It's important to remember that system administration is prettymuch just overhead, much like the janitorial staff (but rather lessimportant; the university can run a lot longer without people tendingthe machines than without people taking out the trash).

The people who are important are those who are doing the organization'swork. The actual work of universities is research and then teachingstudents, so the people with real power here are professors (especiallyif they have grant funding ) and,paradoxically, students. (Students

The one thing that changing hard tabstops allows is for the same file tocome out different for different people. This may explain its enduringpopularity, because in theory you can use it to view source files inyour favorite indentation level while letting me view them in mine. Ifyou like two-space indents and I'm a mutant who likes 8-space ones, wecan both be happy.

Of course this is only an illusion; it breaks down explosively any timeyou need sub-tab indentation (and

I rarely have violent visceral reactions to things. But I have a few hotbuttons, and here's one of them. Quoting from Joel Spolsky's summary :

Nick Gravgaard : "Ratherthan saying that a tab character (a "hard tab") will move the cursoruntil the cursor's position is a multiple of N characters, we shouldsay that a tab character is a delimiter between table cells..."

Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. The core wrongness is visible in a singleline