You are going backwards

Originally posted by Suzianne
But indentation is severely limited when using variable-width fonts. An "m" takes up a lot more space than a "." or even a " ".

Hmm ... out of sheer curiosity, for what reason is it important to use variable width fonts in the first place? (I assume you use a "proper" text-editor (or IDE) as opposed to a word-processor). the variable font thing seem to me no more an obstacle than "having to use" an editor with a dotted watermark on the page is an obstacle to languages that use dots in their syntax,

Originally posted by Suzianne
But indentation is severely limited when using variable-width fonts. An "m" takes up a lot more space than a "." or even a " ".

I don't understand the issue. Indentation is typically white-space and is not significantly affected by variable width fonts.
I mostly code in Java using Eclipse as my IDE and use variable width fonts and have no problems with indentation. (I get the IDE do my indentation for me.) I also use a lot of HTML and XML which also have no major issues with variable width fonts.