I know the answer, I’m hired? 
Whitespace is like the virtual camouflaged predator waiting to viciously shank you through the guts while you’re staring at in its invisible face.
All the while Linus, standing by with his little pet git says “serves you right dumb-s***, I told you you weren’t as smart as me.”
I hate you whitespace.
i love when copying from one app and pasting to another blatantly destroys all sanity in formatting, whitespace in particular. in the following example, i ended up with ‘random’ excess spaces, but none of the occasional extraneous newlines, when copying from a web browser and pasting into my im client as is. the end result was this:
I don't see what all the fuss is about. Voice of reason on February 6, 2010 11:22 PM I know the answer, I'm hired? :) Ion Todirel on February 6, 2010 11:22 PM
copied from above. note the trailing whitespace at the end. also, it’s not only text which was actually indented which was thrashed in the vortex of hell’s anus, but poor words like “I” and “fuss.” as horrible as my typing habits are, also note, amusingly, that the evil demon sharting out whitespace characters decided to take a nap when he saw that someone had an answer, and didn’t mess around with that smilie, as if to say, “i’m bad, but not Chuck Norris bad.” then he turned around and screwed the proverbial pooch on “February 6”, a 2nd time.
Apparently February is cause for computer-related demonic concern. Satan loves February more than i love pancakes, and you are all doomed to a hell of broken parsers. To hell i say! And they don’t have regular cupcakes in hell! Only cupcakes of DOOM! Doom, doom, doom…
btw by extraneous newlines i mean that in other instances newlines also appeared to flaunt the ability to propagate themselves in inconvenient places. here have a random
$’\n’
i’m all out of cookies.
for further amusement, view my profile on this site, and see that the text is stripped of all newlines, even ones explicitly invoked by an html break tag, and worse, the pre tags were stripped and formatting of the most crucial parts (and flavors) was stolen, along with all of my remaining innocence. i shall take refuge in Cookie Monster. All hail big blue furry glutton! (the crowd thereby chants, “Hail! Hail!”, and all the world is saved, until they make a sequel to this apocalyptic mayhem. But fear not! Pajama Hero Nemo, aka Little Nemo: Dream Master, is on guard!)
You said that “maybe the world won’t explode if there are a few extra bits of whitespace in my code” …
Did you’ve ever heard about those countries?
Zahlinkistan
Leeramia
Umbruchsland
or
Abstandstania?
Of course not, because they vanished from our planet after some programmer was careless about his/her withespaces.
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