> I have no idea how spaces won, and I don’t really care (other than my slight annoyance that I will get over, eventually). Does anyone know?
I think, the reason is no one really care. But a common convention is better than everyone use their own style. It was one of pointless holy wars of code styling from a previous century. It is still not completely dead in a C world, but newer language just impose common conventions on everyone, so no more point of arguing should we use 8 spaces indentation, or 4 spaces, or tabs, or should we place a brace on a separate line, or whatever.
Those who deeply cares of these things can fine tune their editor to replace spaces with tabs or vice versa, so on-disk format would conform to conventions, while keeping a complete freedom for editing. But for the most of people it is not important enough to go for such lengths to preserve their preferred style of editing.
One of alternatives should have won and spaces have won. Probably due to a chance. Probably not. But why to bother? We ended with a better world were no one is arguing that their style is better then others'.
Those who deeply cares of these things can fine tune their editor to replace spaces with tabs or vice versa, so on-disk format would conform to conventions, while keeping a complete freedom for editing. But for the most of people it is not important enough to go for such lengths to preserve their preferred style of editing.
One of alternatives should have won and spaces have won. Probably due to a chance. Probably not. But why to bother? We ended with a better world were no one is arguing that their style is better then others'.