6 Mar
2021
6 Mar
'21
10:38 p.m.
On Sun, Mar 07, 2021 at 08:31:57AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
(Straying into COFF territory here)
On Fri, 5 Mar 2021, John Gilmore wrote:
Has anyone asked Stu Feldman why make wanted a tab? Or does anyone know?
I have to believe there was a better reason than it was one tab vs
8 spaces.
The one that got me was make(1). Being used to
text editors that used
"tab" as a command rather than a literal character, I proposed a fix early
on at Sun that would allow leading spaces as well as tabs in Makefiles.
(I think this was in the Unisoft Unix days, pre-BSD.) Bill Shannon
actually put it into their source tree. But in a few days or weeks, he
took it back out, because he realized that Makefiles built on Suns using
leading spaces wouldn't work anywhere else.
I loathe make's distinguishment between tabs and spaces; they look the same
on the screen, and last I looked computers are supposed to serve humans and
not the other way around.