Re: Emacs master build failing on RHEL 6.8

[Paul Eggert]

On 5/7/19 11:49 AM, Mattias Engdegård wrote:
> It's always been allowed as far as I know. Perhaps some pre-standard (K&R) 
> preprocessors didn't like it.

That's correct. C89-and-later allows white space (but not comments)
before the leading "#" in a line. K&R C did not.


> It's common in style rules to mandate # at the left margin, but that always 
> looked like superstition (or perverted aesthetics) to me.

Yes, that common style is often hard to read. It exists mostly because
of inertia. For example, by default cc-mode insists on jamming the "#"
on the left and I have been too lazy so far to fix that (at least it
should respect the already-existing style).