To be honest, what annoys me most about the plus-is-space problem is that it's in the same bucket, more or less, as the spaces-vs.-tabs problem in Makefiles: it could have been fixed a long time ago by dropping support for the plainly broken behaviour, but (and I am assuming here) this was not done to avoid breaking the user experience for the miniscule userbase that existed at the time. Stupid, shortsighted, and stupid once again.