Forum: Ruby-core allow whitespace following EOL continuation backslash

Issue #4513 has been updated by nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada).

Priority changed from Normal to Low

It is easy to change, but I doubt if it is useful.
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Feature #4513: allow whitespace following EOL continuation backslash
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/4513#change-35076

Author: Rich_Morin (Rich Morin)
Status: Assigned
Priority: Low
Assignee: nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)
Category: core
Target version: next minor


=begin
In a few programming languages, the displayed or printed program can 
hide
critical syntactic and/or semantic information.  For example, in make(1)
and Python, the difference between initial tabs and spaces can cause 
bugs
that are not visually apparent.

Ruby has a minor instance of this problem, in that spaces or tabs
between a backslash and the EOL will prevent the line from being 
continued:

 >> a \
 ?> = 2
 => 2
 >> b \
 SyntaxError: compile error
 (irb):3: syntax error, unexpected $undefined, expecting $end
   from (irb):3

Could Ruby open up its syntax to allow any number of intervening spaces 
or tabs before the EOL?
=end