That's a very reasonable question to ask. I suspect that it isn't much of an issue in practice for a few reasons: 1) I'd wager that most projects that have a

That's a very reasonable question to ask. I suspect that it isn't much of an issue in practice for a few reasons: 1) I'd wager that most projects that have a hard 80-column limit also forbid tabs. 2) If a project does use tabs and has a hard line length limit, it can simply say that that limit is interpreted using a certain tab size (e.g. the most common tab size is probably 4 spaces). 3) In my own code, as I've mentioned probably too many times in this thread :-) I don't use column alignment, which is one of the main causes of excessive line length. Because I use indentation for multiline expressions, my lines of code tend to be a lot shorter than they would be with column-aligned expressions.