In a long-anticipated act of administrative clarity, a federal agency tasked with technology standardization has announced a formal national position on the question of whether software source code should be indented with tab characters or with spaces. The directive, officials confirmed, will resolve the matter “definitively, immediately, and permanently,” pending the resolution of a separate directive currently in draft that says the opposite.

The decision follows what one spokesperson described as “an exhaustive multi-year stakeholder engagement process,” during which the agency consulted with more than four hundred software professionals, three union representatives, an unspecified number of consultants, and one extremely confident intern. The resulting recommendation runs to 184 pages, including a 12-page glossary defining the word “indentation.”

According to the published guidance, federal codebases must henceforth use tabs, except where they must use spaces, and except where the choice of either would conflict with legacy systems, in which case the agency recommends “a respectful blend.” Officials clarified that “respectful blend” is a term of art and should not be confused with the colloquial expression for the same thing.

Industry response has been mixed. A trade association representing software developers issued a statement praising the agency’s willingness to take a clear position while requesting clarification on what the position actually is. A separate trade association, representing essentially the same developers, issued a contradictory statement that was also praised.

The directive’s implementation guide provides detailed examples. Example A shows a function indented with tabs. Example B shows the same function indented with spaces. Example C shows the function not indented at all, accompanied by a footnote explaining that this example was included in error but has been retained “for completeness.”

A senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity for reasons that became increasingly unclear as the conversation progressed, defended the document’s internal contradictions as a feature rather than a bug. “Modern policy must accommodate diverse perspectives,” she said. “If everyone is equally unhappy, we have achieved bipartisan technical consensus.”

Compliance teams at affected agencies have begun preparations. One IT director reported that her team has spent the past three weeks converting their codebase from spaces to tabs, then back to spaces, then to a mixture, then to whatever the original was before they started. Productivity, she noted, has never been higher in terms of activity per hour.

The directive does not address the related question of whether closing braces belong on the same line as the preceding statement or on a line of their own. A spokesperson confirmed that this matter is the subject of a separate working group, which is currently deadlocked because half of its members refuse to attend meetings on the grounds that the calendar invitations are improperly formatted.

A frequently-asked-questions document released alongside the main directive addresses several practical concerns. Question 1 asks whether the new standard applies to YAML files. The answer, in full, reads: “Yes, no, and it depends.” Question 2 asks for clarification. The answer reads: “See Question 1.”

Officials remain optimistic that the directive will bring order to a long-disputed area of professional practice. A formal implementation deadline has been set for the end of the next fiscal year, at which point a new directive is expected to replace the current one, having learned, the agency said, from “the valuable lessons of the previous directive, which we are no longer permitted to discuss.”