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by a-nikolaev 2379 days ago
There is nothing that prohibited the original author of Make from allowing any whitespace as a command prefix. The fact that it does not do so is a historical accident, and a mistake admitted by its creator. Such a change would simply make everyone's life easier.

IMO, since Makefile has only one-level indentation for commands, this use of significant whitespace is rather benign, compared to Python.