On Wed, 2021-09-08 at 19:06 +0200, Joerg Schilling via austin-group-l at The Open Group wrote: > Hasn't it been explained many times that the non-orthogonal behavior > of gmake for the += operator
Clearly not, since I asked the question. So the reason for this new operator is related to +=; to allow a recursive append to a variable that was assigned an immediately expanded value. That is not clear from the text added to the standard. I don't see why this couldn't have been the simple reply to my initial question as to why this operator is useful, which would have avoided all the other sturm und drang that's gone on here. Perhaps the reason for adding it wasn't clear to everyone else, either. However, given that there IS a substantive difference between these two operators that I can explain in the GNU make manual I'm OK with implementing this operator in GNU make.
