Compare source code

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:47:59 +0000, Tim Harig wrote:

> I have seen huge patches caused by nothing more then some edit that
> accidently added a trailing space to a large number of lines.  White
> space mangling happens all the time without people even knowing about
> it.

How does an edit accidentally add a trailing space to a large number of 
lines?

(1) The programmer shifted the cursor to the end of the line, pressed 
space, moved down a line, shift to eol, press space, repeat a large 
number of times. I don't call that an "accident".

(2) Some programmer used a tool that thought it was okay to add 
whitespace to the end of lines without being told to. I don't call that 
an accident either, I call that using a broken tool.

So we keep coming back to work-arounds for tools that mangle your data 
for no good reason...


-- 
Steven