Mail Archives: djgpp/1996/11/14/20:56:50
Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il> wrote:
>
>On Wed, 13 Nov 1996, Tor Sjowall wrote:
>
>> I'm sure there is some historic argument for insisting on the tabulator as
>> a prefix to make command lines, but I cannot see any problems with
>> accepting a space too.
>
>The reason is compatibility with other Unix Make's. If Make accepts a
>space, it lets you produce Makefiles that won't be useful with other
>versions of Make on Unix. On the other hand, *all* versions of Make,
>including those which come with DOS compilers, support a TAB as the first
>character.
It's true that 'spaced' makefiles would not work with Unix make programs.
But then, the makefile from dos wouldn't work anyway because of the CR+LF
incompatibility.
Traditionally, in DOS tabulators were used to compress text files by
replacing up to 8 spaces. Because of this, there are several different DOS
text editors that treat tabulators as a compressed space and not as a
character of it's own right. I don't know if tabulators were used the same
way in Unix. There are always problems when moving from one system to
another.
I suggested to modify that specific copy of make to accept both space and
tabulator as an easy fix for one users problems. I still think that this is
a valid option. The alternative has been suggested: 'get a decent editor!'
Tor.
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