Allow me to *try* to bring this back to the original topic :-). I think it’s vital that “::=“, as (provisionally) accepted *8* years ago, be in the final version. The underlying semantics of this (GNU make’s :=) are widely used.
I don’t know if adding :::= and +:= operators is that vital. But if adding them (along with ::=) will yield a unified standard for “make" that enables more makefiles to be portable, I’m fine with it. It’s more work to add to implementations & documentation, and I’d like to see commitment from various make implementations to Implement all of these operators. But if there’s such commitment, great! But Unicode did similar things, e.g., they added Greek Alpha as well as Latin A as separate characters to simplify transition from previous systems. Ideally standards are minimal, but it’s more important to have standards with the necessary capabilities than minimal standards that lack key features. Scott Lurndal: > I've never found Miller's treatise on Recursive make compelling > enough to forgo the use of recursive makefiles :-). I think it’s somewhat situationally-dependent. If the directories are truly independent, recursive makefiles often forgo some parallelism but are otherwise fine. Once there are interdependencies, my experience mirrors Miller’s. In any case, it’s clear that a number of users of “make” depend on immediate evaluation, so it is reasonable to standardize it. --- David A. Wheeler
