Re: [bug #39943] Add an alternative parsing mode that regards space and tab as identical tokens

[Tim Murphy]

spaces-for-tabs bugs are pretty common and very annoying though.

If it's not your editor then it's some stupid website or wiki page
that one puts example makefiles into.  Or one types the example but
theres no way to insert a tab since it takes you to the next field.

Then people cut and past the example and it messes up in an extremely odd way.

It would be nice even if make was able to guess what might be
happening and issue a warning (although in a way I think one might
well go the whole hog).

Regards,

Tim

On 4 September 2013 23:32, Paul Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-09-04 at 18:15 -0400, David Boyce wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 4:42 PM, Paul D. Smith
>> <address@hidden> wrote:
>>         Follow-up Comment #1, bug #39943 (project make):
>>
>>         IMO _any_ editor which automatically replaces TABs with spaces
>>         should never be
>>         considered to be a useful programming tool.  But YMMV of
>>         course.
>>
>> You know what they say about standards and how great it is that
>> there's so many? The Python coding standard calls for no use of tabs
>> and thus many people who do Python coding have their editors
>> configured to turn tabs into spaces. I do, for example.
>
> I meant, editors which always replace TABs with spaces and can't be
> configured to behave other ways.
>
> I have my editor configured to replace TABs with spaces as well, for
> many of the file types I use.  But my editor (Emacs, obviously) makes it
> quite trivial to use different settings for different types of files.
>
>> Of course it's usually possible to configure the editor to use
>> different profiles with different languages but that gets harder since
>> makefiles have no standard extension.
>
> Well, most files DO have standard extensions; my attitude is your editor
> should never reformat your file unless you specifically request it, and
> so I leave the default setting as "no replacement", and only set "please
> replace" on those file types where I want/need it.  Most of those,
> including Python, DO have standard extensions so it's no problem.
>
> Or, of course, you can also use an editor which is capable of basing its
> decisions on more complex features than just an extension :-): Emacs
> knows when I'm editing Makefile or makefile as well.
>
>
> However I do agree that Stu's decision is a good case study when
> deciding risk/reward of maintaining backward compatibility :-p.
>
>
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