getting this to compile

It's not ideological. On my box notepad is replaced with notepad2 and I **do** use notepad to read the code often (hence the "n" shortcut I have for notepad). I also do use use gitk, git diff and obviously github. The code looks differently in each of these tools. So if tabs are for consistency I don't see consistency here. And if you think 4 spaces for a tab is always the right choice it means you never change it so there should be no difference for you between a 4-spaced tab just for spaces.