6 Mar
2021
6 Mar
'21
11:05 p.m.
On Sat, Mar 6, 2021 at 4:38 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Sun, Mar 07, 2021 at 08:31:57AM +1100, Dave
Horsfall wrote:
same
According to Eric Raymond in Chapter 15. Tools: make: Automating Your
Recipes", *The Art of Unix Programming*
*Why the tab in column 1? Yacc <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacc> was
new, Lex <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)> was brand new. I
hadn't tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn.
After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did
something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And
then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of
them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest,
sadly, is history.*
*— Stuart Feldman*
ᐧ
(Straying into COFF territory here)
On Fri, 5 Mar 2021, John Gilmore wrote:
>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 on the screen, and last I looked computers are
supposed to serve humans
and
not the other way around.
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.