drhyde hates software: White-space sensitive file formats

• From: David Cantrell
  Date: 11:24 on 26 Oct 2004
  Subject: White-space sensitive file formats
  
  Today I am mostly hating Makefiles, for they require the use of tabs and
  not spaces.
  
  
  

• From: Michael G Schwern
  Date: 22:30 on 26 Oct 2004
  Subject: Re: White-space sensitive file formats
  
  On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 11:24:41AM +0100, David Cantrell wrote:
  > Today I am mostly hating Makefiles, for they require the use of tabs and
  > not spaces.
  
  Speaking of crappy, archaic data formats, have a look at an Aegis change 
  file that you're supposed to type in by hand.
  
    brief_description = "Create initial skeleton.";
  
    description = "A simple calculator using native \
    floating point precision.  \
    The four basic arithmetic operators to be provided, \
    using conventional infix notation.  \
    Parentheses and negation also required.";
  
    cause = internal_enhancement;
  
  Yes, newlines have to be escaped a-la C strings.  And you need the trailing
  semicolon even though there's no grammatic need for either.  The author says 
  this is better because you get better error messages if you leave off an end 
  quote.
  
  *boggle*  That's right, its optimized for the error condition.
  
  Its things like that why I've given up on Aegis.
  
  
  
  

• From: Tony Bowden
  Date: 10:09 on 27 Oct 2004
  Subject: Re: White-space sensitive file formats
  
  On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 05:30:59PM -0400, Michael G Schwern wrote:
  > Speaking of crappy, archaic data formats, have a look at an Aegis change 
  > file that you're supposed to type in by hand.
  
  >   cause = internal_enhancement;
  
  And, if you spell that as:
      cause = internal_enhancemnet;
  
  You get an error:
  
  aegis: /home/tony/aegis-12159-1: 7: no "internal_enhancemnet", guessing
          "internal_enhancement"
  
  Which would be great if it actually corrected it for you and created the
  change anyway. But oh no. It just laughs at you, tells you how stupid
  you were to make such a silly mistake, and refuses to do anything until
  you create it again - correctly this time.
  
  There are only something like 7 valid strings here.  They're all
  sufficiently different to be able to guess with 99% accuracy any simple
  mistake.  But when I brought up on the mailing list that perhaps they
  should just do what I obviously wanted, especially as they've taken
  the trouble to work out what I obviously wanted, I was told that that
  would be a Very Bad Thing as it might get the wrong thing. Because if
  I type "internal_enhancemnet" I _obviously_ might really have meant
  "external_bug".
  
  Tony
  
  

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