Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com>:
> Not quite; tools like diff that put a character at the beginning of
> the line are likely to be tab-aware,
No, just tried it again: diff outputs tabs as tabs.
$ diff abc def
1,2c1,2
< abc
< abc
---
> def
> def
where line 1 begins with a tab and line 2 begins with 8 spaces in each
file.
> and gcc is certainly going to comprehend them
$ gcc -c test.c
test.c:1:2: error: expected identifier or ‘(’ at end of input
where test.c contains
<TAB>(<LF>
IOW, gcc reports that the open parenthesis is in column 2.
> (at least to the extent of treating them as whitespace).
Sure, but that doesn't concern the tab stops in any way.
> And I think less takes notice of them, too,
How?
> so it's only the very simplest tools like cat that actually ignore
> them or treat them as single characters (or even bytes).
They all seem to be "simple." At least Python is:
$ python3 -c 'print ('
File "<string>", line 1
print (
^
SyntaxError: unexpected EOF while parsing
where the caret is pointing at the wrong visual column.
Marko
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