Re: New escape method proposal

[Paul Smith]

On Sun, 2014-03-09 at 18:38 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Paul Smith wrote:
> > The current handling of backslashes is, IMO, really horrible and just
> > confusing and not very useful.  I'd love to get rid of it
> 
> We could get rid of it when the new quoting feature is used anywhere in 
> the makefile.  That wouldn't break existing makefiles.

I don't think this would work so well, since we could be all the way at
the end of the makefile before we see the first instance of the new
quoting character, and backslashes today are handled while the makefile
is parsed.  Switching behaviors half-way through parsing a makefile
would be confusing.

I'd prefer to just deprecate it, and remove it later.  Or else preserve
it for backward-compatibility but just point out that it's very flawed.