Proposal to fix whitespace design mistake in make.

[chris at seberino.org]

Even the author admits relying on tabs in makefiles was a mistake.

Wouldn't it be easy to allow an alternative to tabs in gmake and then watch
people slowly start to use the new method?

I agree it would break backward compatibility and not work with non-GNU make's.
On the other hand, (I assume) gmake is the most popular make around?
So it seems it would be an improvement.

2 trivial alternatives...

1. colons

e.g.

all: foo
:    do_something
:    do_something

2. braces

e.g.

all: foo {
     do_something
     do_something
}

Problem solved!?

cs