Greg Ewing wrote:
Steve Holden wrote:
Isn't it strange how nobody every complained about the significance of
whitespace in makefiles: only the fact that leading tabs were required
rather than just-any-old whitespace.
Make doesn't care how *much* whitespace there
is, though, only whether it's there or not. If
it accepted anything that looks like whitespace,
there would be no cause for complaint.
Make and the *roff formats had the nasty feature that they treated
homographs differently. That is, you could print two sources that
placed all the same ink on the paper at the same places, but they
would perform differently. For make it was tabs. For the *roff
files, the periods ending sentences and the periods for abbreviations
(such as honorifics) were distinguished by following end-of-sentence
periods with two spaces. This left any line ending in a period
ambiguous, and tools to strip whitespace off the end of lines as
information-destroying.
--Scott David Daniels
scott.dani...@acm.org
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