Computer Dictionary of Information Technology

indentation

Space and/or tab characters added at the beginning of a line to indicate structure, e.g. indenting a quotation to make it stand out or indenting a block of code controlled by an if statement.

Indentation is important in source code for readability. There are a number of different indent styles. Some programming languages go further and use indentation as the main method to represent block structure to the compiler or interpreter, see off-side rule.