I once (back in the mid-1980's) spent several weeks hunting down a makefile bug. In the end it turned out to be a SPACE character that preceded a TAB character.
Back in that 1970's developer's paradise, it was not possible to lose a space next to a tab, because we did not have WYSIWYG editors, we had "vi" which has an easy toggle to show white space characters. "Back in the day" everything had a command line interface, and non-developers were afraid of computers. Ah, the good old daze...
It's some weeks of my life I will never get back.
I hate make and it's 'entire syntax'.