Mail Archives: djgpp/1995/05/29/23:56:03
>> Why was the decision not to allow just any whitespace made again? It
>> seems rather arbitrary, particularly as most other programs don't care.
>
>It was an arbitrary decision. One that Stu Feldman (I *think*
>that's his name), almost immediately felt was a bad decision when
>he released the first make program many years ago. But, he also
>felt, that changing the definition of a makefile, after it had
>already been "widely distributed" would have been an even greater
>mistake. So here we are.
Why does that situation seem vaguely familiar? :-)
>You could probably get more information on this than you ever
>cared to really know by asking about it on alt.folklore.computer,
>comp.programming, or comp.lang.c.
Not a bad idea.
>Btw, there is a very simple one line patch to GNUMake to allow
>any whitespace there. I believe it's been posted to this list
>before.
Perhaps I'll check the archives.
>But it's just never seemed to have been pushed hard
>enough by GNUMake users, to get rolled into the official
>distribution. While I imagine that the make maintainer would
>probably be resitant to such including such a patch (after all,
>it's really only the PC world that has makes that take any white
>space there, at least I don't know of any unix makes that will),
>I imagine that if enough people asked for it, he might be
>persuaded. After all, GNUMake already has extensions that aren't
>in the POSIX standard.
Perhaps it could be a flag (-a, --allow-arbitrary-whitespace) so that
purists would be satisfied.
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