On Jan 15, 2014, at 7:38 AM, John McKown <[email protected]> wrote:
> Not just GNU make, but z/OS UNIX make as well. I can proffer an possible > reason. Remember from whence UNIX came. The original terminals were serial > terminals connected via RS-232. The tab key, then as now, was close to the > left pinky finger (along with the shift key). So my guess is that the > original programmers were thinking: "What is an easy to hit key for a field > delimiter which will allow us to use any printable character in a field > value. Space? No, we might want spaces in the field value (such as a user's > name in the /etc/passwd file). Hum, well, there is that TAB key placed > nicely for relatively easy use, if we don't need it too often. Sounds like > a winner." I read once (although I can’t find a reference, and haven’t been able to craft a Google search that isn’t swamped with false positives) that the author of make quickly realized that requiring a tab character was a mistake, but he already had a large enough legacy user base that introducing a change that would break existing makefiles wouldn’t be popular. It’s not just z/OS folks who hate this, in Unix it’s also a problem because humans can’t visually distinguish a line that begins with a tab character from a line that begins with multiple spaces. -- Curtis Pew ([email protected]) ITS Systems Core The University of Texas at Austin ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
