On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 05:53:59AM -0700, dmiller spake thus:
> I would be concerned about this group, if there was any evidence of
> existence.
Same here, but even with such evidence I would not be so concerned that
I would not make the change.
This calls to mind Stuart Feldman's explanation as to the reason
Makefile syntax today still requires leading <TAB> characters in
recipies, as documented by Eric Raymond in
_The_Art_of_Unix_Programming_, Section 15.4.1[0]:
<quote>
No discussion of make(1) would be complete without an
acknowledgement that it includes one of the worst design botches in
the history of Unix. The use of tab characters as a required leader
for command lines associated with a production means that the
interpretation of a makefile can change drastically on the basis of
invisible differences in whitespace.
Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex 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
</quote>
[0] http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch15s04.html
That's on page 358 of my dead tree edition.
ISBN: 0-13-142901-9
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