Re: missing separator stop <- looking to quickly solve that

[Garrett Cooper]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 11:18 AM, Sam Ravnborg <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 02:11:26PM -0400, Paul Smith wrote:
>> On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 10:44 -0700, Patrick Horgan wrote:
>> > In the original K & R C book there was an exercise to build entab and
>> > detab programs--easy to do with FSM.  I bet if you search with google
>> > you can find a million of them. (Perhaps a million and seventeen).
>>
>> If that's all you want a trivial perl script will do as well:
>>
>>         perl -pe 's/^        /\t/'
>>
>> (untested).  This is good enough for make, which only cares about the
>> first character on the line.
>
> Yet for many simple uses (think windoze users that do
> not know how to insert tabs) it would be a usefull
> extension with:
> .ASSUMETAB:
>
> So whenever Make today says "did you mean a tab" then
> it would instead just assume so.
>
> I know that adding the above to existing scripts would
> break them, but I also know that for example at my job
> people has an additional editor solely for the purpose
> of editing Makefiles.
> And the Makefile they use would work perfectly fine
>
> if gmake just assumed a tab when it saw
>
> target: prerequisite
> <8 spaces>command
>
> I would never use this on Linux but I could see
> benefits on Windoze simply due to the Windoze users
> inherited bad habbits (and tool issues).
>
>        Sam

Then comes the issue of style. Different programs, as well as
different users define tabs to be different amounts of spaces when
editing.
\t preceding each rule is just a much simpler, cleaner rule to follow.

IMO (I'm representing myself; not the make folks) if you don't play by
the rules you have one of two choices:

1. Play the game as required.
2. Don't play.

-Garrett

PS Using awk, perl, sed, tcl, ... to reformat text is most likely the
best means of solving the problem.