Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 8217998 1/2: Preserve nonblank whitespace when indenting (Bug#32200)

Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 8217998 1/2: Preserve nonblank whitespace when indenting (Bug#32200)

[Stefan Monnier]

> -  (back-to-indentation)
> +  (beginning-of-line 1)
> +  (skip-chars-forward " \t")

Makes me wonder: why does back-to-indentation skip over those other
"whitespace" chars?

This behavior was introduced by:

    commit 0ea364e605cb3010fbf3314344a2f3ecfb38f3a3
    Author: Richard M. Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
    Date:   Tue Feb 4 10:41:10 2003 +0000
    
        (back-to-indentation): Skip all whitespace except for newlines.

and then its effect slightly reduced by:

    commit b986346637b8ed9e1e79355a2707f42d7ace37fe
    Author: Richard M. Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
    Date:   Thu Apr 24 01:57:46 2003 +0000
    
        (back-to-indentation): Call backward-prefix-chars.

In my experience, using "whitespace syntax" is just not really a good
idea in general: it's used to save having to enumerate the chars we
consider as whitespace, but "chars we consider as whitespace" is not
nearly as well defined as one might think, so sooner or later we
discover that the whitespace syntax applies to more chars than one
would like.


        Stefan