On ZIL indentation

I tried to give this post an eye-catching title like "The Power of Indentation!" But my fingers wouldn't have it. Blame the fingers. I don't know much about the text-editing tools used at Infocom. The Witness source directory includes a tantalizing mention of TECO, an editor used at MIT in the 1960s and 70s. Going back a couple of years, there's a map file in the 1978 MDL Zork repository which seems to about managing TECO keybindings. TECO's editing macros later evolved into their own editor, naturally called "Emacs". Wikipedia notes: By 1979, Emacs was the main editor used in MIT's AI lab and its Laboratory for Computer Science. It seems certain that Infocom folks used Emacs at some point, but I don't have any evidence about when. Whatever editor they used, we can ask: Did it auto-indent their ZIL code? The ZIL code we have is very consistently indented, so it seems like a good bet, but I don't know for sure. The only reference in the 1989 ZIL manual is: Also note the spaces at the…