emacs sources awash in trailing blanks

emacs sources awash in trailing blanks

[Dan Jacobson]

Gentlemen, emacs sources are the home of many stowaway trailing
blanks, hiding at the ends of lines, just waiting for their
opportunity to reproduce more of themselves thru a cut and paste by an
oblivious non show-trailing-whitespace using developer.
cd /usr/share/emacs/21.3/lisp/
LC_ALL=C grep -c ' $' *.el /dev/null
abbrev.el:4
abbrevlist.el:1...

Customs, in a quick spot check of that emacs source directory, found
LC_ALL=C grep -c ' $' *.el |grep -v :0|wc -l
140
trailing blanks infected files.

"Stallman would spin in his grave if he went thru life with
show-trailing-whitespace enabled to see what was going on, and of
course if he were dead."

(The LC_ALL=C is needed to avoid the grep 3rd world locales slowdown bug.)

(show-trailing-whitespace is great for quibblers like me. "If you
can't attack their content, well, there's surely a trailing blank or two...")

Re: emacs sources awash in trailing blanks

[Stefan Monnier]

> Gentlemen, emacs sources are the home of many stowaway trailing
> blanks, hiding at the ends of lines, just waiting for their
> opportunity to reproduce more of themselves thru a cut and paste by an
> oblivious non show-trailing-whitespace using developer.

We're an equal opportunity project; we do not discriminate against
trailing whitespace.


        Stefan

whitespace a misnomer

[Dan Jacobson]

S> We're an equal opportunity project; we do not discriminate against
S> trailing whitespace.

Come to think of it, whitespace is a misnomer, a relic of offices with
white paper.  As I type, "whitespace" is indeed black on one screen,
red on another, grey on another, etc.
$ man perlre|grep -c white
12
Worse is whitelisting/blacklisting etc. Or maybe let's just accept
it. [OK perldudes, close this bug that I hereby opened.]