From:	tor AT sn DOT no (Tor Sjowall)
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: Make problem with spaces instead of tabs
Date:	Wed, 13 Nov 1996 00:00:25 GMT
Organization:	SN Internett
Lines:	27
Message-ID:	<328c0dd0.353900065@news.sn.no>
References:	<3288FD63 DOT 2544 AT fab DOT net>
NNTP-Posting-Host:	nm17-3.ppp.sn.no
Mime-Version:	1.0
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

Eric Christopherson <Draximus AT fab DOT net> wrote:

>I'm sure many of you have got the message from make that there is a
>missing spearator. In most cases that I have seen, this means that a
>statement has spaces in front of it, rather than an actual tab. In my
>experience, if you change the spaces to a tab, make works fine. What I
>want to know is this: is there a version of make that accepts the
>spaces, and/or is there a program to automatically change spaces at the
>beginning of lines to tabs?

If you look in the source for make-3.75, you will find the following:

read.c, line 403:

      if (lb.buffer[0] == '\t')

read.c, line 669:
        
      else if (lb.buffer[0] == '\t')

It is easy to change these lines to check for space in addition to tab.

I'm sure there is some historic argument for insisting on the tabulator as
a prefix to make command lines, but I cannot see any problems with
accepting a space too.

Tor.

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