I was talking to some guys at work today about scalability and data efficiency, and an example came up that I had to think about for a second. One of the guys, a lead developer, started talking about the difference between 5 spaces and a tab. He said that the programming standard says that everyone should use spaces to standardize formatting of source code, but, if we want to conserve some bandwidth, we should look at using a tab instead. That sounds boring, doesn’t it? Well, it is until you do the math.