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

[Sam Ravnborg]

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