Whitespace in LilyPond source files

[David Wright]

After the pause (for want of a better word) in receiving list emails
by eggs.gnu.org, I received a number of near-duplicate postings that
had been held up. One of them was a posting with the subject line
Subject: magnifyStaff bug?
which was written before but, like a Beethoven Piano Concerto,
was received after the posting
Subject: MagnifyStaff Bug?

The first post was written in text, and its LP example is easy to cut
and paste into a file and then process.

The second post, which I tried to use because it arrived first, had
been written in HTML. Correctly, the sender's client had included
a text representation, but unfortunately the HTML source meant that
the LP lines ran on to each other, causing my client to insert +
indicators after each line-wrap.

So, I looked at the HTML version, and it seemed fine. However, when
cut and pasted, it was evident that the indentation was achieved by
using NO-BREAK SPACE characters (Hex 00A0) which LP does not like.

Then the thought occurred to me, why? LP is not like python: it might
be whitespace-separated, but any indentation is semantically
meaningless. It's happy to take TABs as well as SPACEs, and even
end-of-lines, so why not other varieties of whitespace?

Cheers,
David.