Trailing whitespace is enough of a problem for programmers that editors like Emacs have special functions that highlight it or get rid of it automatically, and many coding standards require you to eliminate all instances of it. I'm not entirely sure why though. I can think of one practical reason of avoiding unnecessary whitespace, and it is that if people are not careful about avoiding it, then they might change it in between commits, and then we get diffs polluted with seemingly unchanged lines, just because someone removed or added a space. 

This already sounds like a pretty good reason to avoid it, but I do want to see if there's more to it than that. So, why is trailing whitespace such a big deal?

Reasons that it's important to me:


When I hit the "End" key, I expect the cursor to go to the end of the line (depending what editor I'm using and how it's configured) and I expect to be able to start typing right away. If the cursor gets there and I have to delete 3 or 4 characters, it's annoying. Especially if it's inconsistent throughout the file(s).
When I have string literals that span multiple lines, trailing whitespace can make the output string look incorrect when it's used.


While not strictly programming, whitespace can seriously mess up data entry, if there's trailing/leading in a file that will be parsed and used as input to something else. This happens the most when a clean, generated input file gets dirtied by someone editing it in Excel or something and then trailing whitespace (and other formatting issueS) can creep in.
