On Jan 11, 2008, at 8:05 AM, Todd Burch wrote:
> Hi there.  Why does the Here Document
> require there to be no space after
> the closing symbol?  If I type "EOD " and press
> enter, I get a syntax error. (See below.) If I type "EOD" with
> an immediate carraige return, it works fine.
>
> Why so stringent?


I would guess because it is simpler to implement and simpler to  
understand.

If you made trailing white space allowed on the closing delimiter  
then you must define 'white space' and you have to explicitly ignore  
it when scanning for the end of the text.  If you changed the rule to  
simply look for a line prefixed by the delimiter (so that white space  
wasn't an issue) then you would end up with strange things like:

text <<EOT
line 1
EOTX terminates the line

It is just simpler and less ambiguous to look for a line that  
contains the delimiter and only the delimiter.

Gary Wright