[tz] tabs vs spaces

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On May 1, 2013, at 3:39 PM, Guy Harris wrote:

> 
> On May 1, 2013, at 5:08 AM, Tobias Conradi <mail.2012 at tobiasconradi.com> wrote:
> 
>> And I assume not any white space separates tokens.
> 
> If you mean "not all white space characters are valid separators", I suspect that none of Vertical Tab, Carriage Return, or Line Feed/New Line would be considered valid separators, and I don't know whether we support non-ASCII characters in the data portion (rather than the comment portion) of the files, so Non-Breaking Space, for example, might not be valid either.
> 
> However, I consider treating tabs and spaces differently to be an error (I think Stu Feldman considered it one of the biggest mistakes in Make); we should allow arbitrary numbers of tabs and/or spaces to be valid separators.

Correct.  That is the normal definition for any programming language that is roughly free-form (i.e., just about every well known language other than Python and Fortran.  And even those two allow tabs and spaces to be mixed, but since layout has meaning there things are slightly more constrained.

The intent of the zic rules is clearly the same as the lexical rules of languages like C or Pascal.  In other words, the original report was in error, and the files are correct as they stand.

	paul