Server :: Bind9 Config Files: Leading Whitespace Requirements?

Is leading whitespace significant in bind9 config files? This reverse lookup file (/var/chroot/bind9/etc/bind/zones/rev.168.168.192.in-addr.arpa) did not work; /var/log/messages had "zone 168.168.192.in-addr.arpa/IN: has no NS records".Inserting 3 spaces before IN in the NS line fixed it:

Code:

; IP Address-to-Host DNS Pointers for the 192.168.168.0 subnet
@ IN SOA CW8vDS.localdomain. hostmaster.localdomain. (
2011041901 ; serial
8H ; refresh

[code]...

Reading the man pages and netsearching, I did not find anything about indentation requirements except for "This is usually indented for readability, but the indents are required syntactically" here.Although the above file works, named-checkconf reports an error in it:

Code:

root@CW8vDS:/var/chroot/bind9/etc/bind/zones# named-checkconf rev.168.168.192.in-addr.arpa
rev.168.168.192.in-addr.arpa:1: syntax error near ';'

but named initialisation does not log any errors or warnings in /var/log/messages when processing this file except "/etc/bind/zones/rev.168.168.192.in-addr.arpa:2: no TTL specified; using SOA MINTTL instead".