6 Mar
2021
6 Mar
'21
10:31 p.m.
(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
same on the screen, and last I looked computers are supposed to serve
humans and not the other way around.
-- Dave