Re: Whitespace (Was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.)

Jonathan Eifrig <eifrig@beanworld.cs.jhu.edu> wrote:
> C doesn't escape such cruftiness either, unfortunately: "\<NEWLINE>"
>is not the same as "\<SPACE><NEWLINE>", and the fact that preprocessor
>directives must start in column 1 means that the newline character isn't
>really "white" at all. An unfortunate legacy of the preprocessor.


I think that ANSI-C allows white space before "#" for preprocessor
directives. Anyway, as far as I know, there's no reason to have
"\<SPACE><NEWLINE>" as different from "\<NEWLINE>" ... in fact, the C
compilers for the IBM mainframe and AS/400 treat these as the same
(they have to: many source files have fixed-length records).


Another example of "white space" not being white is in "make": the
commands have to be preceded by a tab, which is not equivalent to
spaces. Again, there's no good reason for this, except perhaps
maintaining some strange kind of compatibility with the early
implementations.
--
Peter Ludemann ludemann@netcom.com
--

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