[oblio]

And the (funny?) thing is that now the whole world has to suffer, probably millions of developers, because at one point tar had an installed user base of about 500 people. Yay for backwards compatibility :)

Make is another famous victim of this:

> Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex was brand new. I hadn't tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn. After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history.

[teddyh]

> now the whole world has to suffer

Bad example, since tar still works with a dash:

  tar -ztvf foo.tar.gz

> Make is another famous victim of this:

Now that is a much better example.