I hope the parent was being humourous. 1 tab is 1 byte, 4 spaces is 4 bytes, so it doesn't actually work anyway. And you can't rely on it being multiples of 4

I hope the parent was being humourous. 1 tab is 1 byte, 4 spaces is 4 bytes, so it doesn't actually work anyway. And you can't rely on it being multiples of 4 anyway, so you'd have to iterate and check the bytes to check they are actually spaces. So no, it's be slower, but not enough to matter. Edit: or is the parent proposing the opposite? I sti hope they're being humourous as it still doesn't really matter