[TUHS] tabs vs spaces - entab, detab

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sun, 7 Mar 2021, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> (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
>

I used to have my own system for doing "make"-like builds which was a lot 
more primitive and just relied on a tool that returned an errorlevel based 
on whether a file needed to be rebuilt.

Of course, that was because I used an editor that destroyed tabs. :/ Damn 
it, M$...

-uso.