On 2010-11-04, Grant Edwards <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote: > On 2010-11-04, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote: >> On 2010-11-04, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <da...@druid.net> wrote: >>> Right. If you mangle spaces in Python or mangle braces in C then >>> recovery becomes impossible. I don't think anyone is contesting that. >>> What we question is the idea that somehow Python is special in this >>> regard. If you move files around in ways that change them then your >>> tools are broken. The fact that the breakage is somewhat "friendlier" >>> to some types of files is interesting but irrelevant. >> >> Again, why does "diff -b" exist? >> >> It exists because so many things change whitespace unintentionally that >> it's a common failure mode. > > It exists because so many people change whitespace intentionally in C > source code because no two C programmers seem able to agree on how to > format code. Diff -b allows you to attempt to ignore semantically > null stylistic changes made by programmers.
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. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list