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.Daniels at Acm.Org
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