begin quoting Christian Seberino as of Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 07:44:37PM -0800:
>
> On Sun, February 4, 2007 7:05 pm, Stewart Stremler wrote:
>
> > What's the problem with COBOL requiring indentation? Or ForTran? Or
> > Makefiles? I've heard a LOT of complaining over the years about those
> > things; Ant was written, in part, because the developers liked XML and
> > hated the Makefile required indentation trick.
>
> Makefile is especially egregious because it distinguishes between TABs and
> spaces. I've gotten burned by that before. ESR pointed that one out and
> I have to agree Makefiles are especially bad.
Advantage of makefiles is that they only have one level of indentation;
either it's indented, or it isn't. I think the reason that it isn't
"tab or space" is that you'd then end up with makefiles with just one
space used to indicate action -- and we already have very long lines
(that wrap) that can be confusing.
And making it more than just one space -- say, if we require eight --
would lead to _more_ bugs.
I always figured we should've replaced Make with a TCL-style syntax:
targetname {dependency-list} {action-list}
Or perhaps straight TCL, and have a keyword named "target":
target targetname {dependency-list} {action-list}
...and then we'd be able to stop worrying about the whitespace, and
we'd have something more readable than the various CONS flavors.
--
It probably already exists out there somewhere.
Stewart Stremler
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