From: tor AT sn DOT no (Tor Sjowall) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: Make problem with spaces instead of tabs Date: Wed, 13 Nov 1996 18:38:21 GMT Organization: SN Internett Lines: 31 Message-ID: <328a1275.420624053@news.sn.no> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: nm20-6.ppp.sn.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Eli Zaretskii 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.