Re: the war on trailing whitespace

The only language I know of where the presence of whitespace on blank lines matters is make(1). Even there, it's subtle. It's okay to have (using "cat -e" syntax)

foo : bar$
	command$
$
	command$

But there's a difference between

foo : bar$
	$

which specifies an empty command and will therefore not use a default rule, and

foo : bar$ $

which does not specify any command and so will use a default rule if one exists.

(Of course, you can also get [ \t]\n inside an arbitrary binary file, too.)