[TUHS] tabs vs spaces - entab, detab

[Dave Horsfall]

(Straying into COFF territory here)

On Fri, 5 Mar 2021, John Gilmore wrote:

> The one that got me was make(1).  Being used to text editors that used 
> "tab" as a command rather than a literal character, I proposed a fix 
> early on at Sun that would allow leading spaces as well as tabs in 
> Makefiles.  (I think this was in the Unisoft Unix days, pre-BSD.)  Bill 
> Shannon actually put it into their source tree.  But in a few days or 
> weeks, he took it back out, because he realized that Makefiles built on 
> Suns using leading spaces wouldn't work anywhere else.

I loathe make's distinguishment between tabs and spaces; they look the 
same on the screen, and last I looked computers are supposed to serve 
humans and not the other way around.

-- Dave