[PATCH v2] gas: retain whitespace between strings

[Alan Modra]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 08:00:15AM +0100, Jan Beulich wrote:
> On 23.03.2022 02:06, Alan Modra wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 03:15:16PM +0100, Jan Beulich via Binutils wrote:
> >> section. I'm afraid the only way that I see to deal with this would be
> >> to significantly simplify the scrubber, such that it wouldn't do much
> >> more than collapse sequences of unquoted whitespace into a single blank.
> > 
> > Agreed.  I said much the same a long time ago.
> 
> In this case, are there reasons speaking against doing so (besides the
> effort it takes)?

I don't think so.  The original intent regarding the gas preprocessor
was to not preprocess gcc output (#NO_APP) *and* for the assembler to
not accept unnecessary whitespace from gcc.  User assembly would be
preprocessed to remove unnecessary whitespace so that most gas code
would not need SKIP_WHITESPACE.  I think this was a bad design,
because the preprocessor needed to know too much info about syntax.
In any case the ideal proved difficult to achieve, so we have
SKIP_WHITESPACE all over the place anyway.

We may need a few more instances of SKIP_WHITESPACE if app.c is
simplified.

-- 
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM