In the old days, with limited memory, editors would only read a file up to
the formfeed. The programmer would edit the text up to the formfeed and
then read in the next block (up to the next formfeed). This way the whole
file need not be in memory at once. Compilers ignore it. Obviously they
can be eliminated now.
Blake McBride
On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 11:08 AM Pete Dietl <petedi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why are there so many form feeds in the source?
>
> Running this from the root of the Make repo:
>
> cd src && grep -c $'\f' *.[ch] | grep -v ':0$' | sort -t : -k 2 -n -r |
> awk -F : 'BEGIN {printf "%-15s Number of form feeds\n", "File"; print
> "------------------------------------" } {printf "%-15s %2d\n", $1, $2}'
>
> Results in:
>
> File Number of form feeds
> ------------------------------------
> variable.c 17
> read.c 15
> misc.c 12
> job.c 11
> function.c 10
> dir.c 10
> remake.c 9
> main.c 8
> file.c 8
> expand.c 6
> commands.c 6
> vpath.c 5
> rule.c 5
> output.c 5
> getopt.c 4
> arscan.c 4
> remote-stub.c 3
> remote-cstms.c 3
> ar.c 3
> implicit.c 2
> getopt1.c 2
> version.c 1
> makeint.h 1
> hash.h 1
> default.c 1
>
