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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

I have never understood this. Making MAKE accept spaces in addition to tabs would be a backwards-compatible change. I see no reason why this could not be done even today.

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Because make needs to tell the difference between the rules and then the recipes. Make tells the difference by requiring recipes (you shell scripts) to be preceded by tab.

If you let Make accept spaces then there’s no backwards compatible way for it to tell the difference.

You can change the behavior of make to allow a different character to be used before recipes, but then it’s not backwards compatible with other files.

> If you let Make accept spaces then there’s no backwards compatible way for it to tell the difference.

"Rules start with non-whitespace"?

That breaks backwards compatibility since a rule line can start with spaces:

    nonws:
    <tab>echo nonws
      ws:
    <tab>echo ws

> a rule line can start with spaces

Well, that's stupid.

And it's news to me. I have never seen a makefile that actually did this. So you could still fix the problem and be backwards-compatible for probably 99% of actual cases. And you could provide a --stupid-whitespace-mode flag for non-backwards-compatible makefies.

Honestly, I still see no legitimate reason to continue this insanity.

Not all that uncommon, especially in ifdef situations:

  ifdef (something,something)
    rule:
          something specific recipe
  else
    rule:
          common recipe
  endif

It's also not just rules. Variable assignments are also separate from recipes, and can be indented with spaces.

  ifdef (something)
    CFLAGS=something
  else
    CFLAGS=otherthing
  endif

OK, you've convinced me. MAKE is beyond redemption.

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