You're quite right, and I address that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20381842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20381842 tl;dr don't do that be

You're quite right, and I address that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20381842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20381842 tl;dr don't do that because it's ugly to conflate two purposes of indentation in this way, but if you absolutely must conflate them then do so explicitly with tabs and spaces, as you describe, and use an editor which makes the difference visually apparent. This actually boils down to an argument in favor of tabs, because the additional semantic information allows the editor to present you more visual cues to work with.