A lot of decent code won't fit into 78 columns with 8-character tabs. An if statement inside a for loop inside a function inside a class is already 4 levels of

A lot of decent code won't fit into 78 columns with 8-character tabs. An if statement inside a for loop inside a function inside a class is already 4 levels of indentation. Call a ten-letter function with three ten-letter arguments and you're over the limit. It depends a lot on the style of code... some apis will have really long names and require a lot of arguments. In this case you'll run over 80 columns even if you use two-space indentation (which we do at my workplace).