Tabs, spaces and your salary – how is it really?

Re:Tabs, spaces and your salary – how is it really? by na85 on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @12:33PM (#14596026)

Is that a limitation in GNU Make or is it an inherited limitation of m4?

In my experience, m4 is an arcane bit of software that surprisingly few people know about and one that frankly should have been replaced years ago.

Personally, I try to never use autoconf because of this.

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Re:Tabs, spaces and your salary – how is it really? by dasyatidprime on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @12:48PM (#14596172)

Tab as the prefix for command lines is a property of all Makefile formats I'm aware of (though not of many other build script formats). Make itself (including GNU Make) does not generally use M4, though both Autoconf and Automake use it, often in conjunction with Make, as part of the Autotools suite which is also published by GNU.

So, none of the above, in itself. It is a historical anomaly which has been preserved.

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Re:Tabs, spaces and your salary – how is it really? by khedoros1 on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @01:13PM (#14596420)

I haven't dug into it, but Wikipedia claims that Make is actually about a year older than M4 (obviously not GNU Make).

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