Bit strange thinking of Python as "old" .. anyway, what I suspect happened was that tabs were the "new" innovation - in the post-punchcard era. Punchcards couldn't meaningfully have a tab
character, but they could have fixed character
positions, and this feature was required by COBOL and FORTRAN in their day. It was still present in the F77 standard.
I think the other thing that got in the way of standardising on TAB was that 8 character indent is too much, but once you let people configure it it's no longer consistent between systems.
> that's some impressively old code to find on GitHub
You may like https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11
