suggestion: clean white space / end of line definition

[Georg Wrede]

Thomas Kuehne wrote:
> Here is a faster mock-up

(Apologies in advance, and totally ignoring the good code, standards 
compliance and some other good things,) I have to ask:

Is this a Good Thing?

Admittedly not having thought through this issue myself, all I have is a 
gut feeling. But that gut feeling says that source code (especially in a 
systems language in the C family) should strive to hinder all kinds of 
Funny Stuff from entering the toolchain.

Accepting "foreign" characters within strings (and possibly even in 
comments) is OK, but in the source code itself, that's my issue here.

We can already have variable names in D written in Afghan and 
Negro-Potamian, which I definitely don't consider a good idea. If we 
were to follow this line of thought, then the next thing we know 
somebody might demand to have all D keywords translated to every single 
language in the bushes, and to have the compiler accept them as Equal 
synonyms to the Original Keywords. (This actually happened with the CP/M 
operating system in Finland in the early eighties! You don't want to 
hear the whole story.)

What will this do to cross-cultural study, reuse, and copying of example 
code? Won't it eventually compatmentalize most all code written outside 
of the Anglo-Centric world? That is, alienate it from us, but also from 
each of the other cultures too.

And who says parentheses and operators should only be the ones you need 
a Western keyboard to type? I bet there are cultures that use (or will 
insist on using, once the rumour is it's possible) some preposterous ink 
blots instead, for example.

And the next thing of course would be the idiot Humanists who'd demand 
that a non-breaking space really has to be equal to the underscore "for 
people think in words, and subjecting humans to CamelCase or 
under_scored names constitutes deplorable Oppression". And this kind of 
people refuse to see the [to us] obvious horrible ramifications of it.

And this I wrote in spite of my mother tongue needing non-ASCII 
characters in every single sentence.

But, as I said at the outset, this is just a gut feeling, so I'm not 
pressing the issue as if it were something I'd analyzed 
through-and-through.

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Now, what is obvious, however, is that the current compiler *should* be 
consistent with whitespace and the like, instead of haphazardly 
enumerating some of them each time. No argument there.