Re: New escape method proposal (was: Re: Possible solution for special characters in makefile paths)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Paul Smith <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 18:33:06 -0400
> 
> What I'm after conceptually with $[] quoting is creating new,
> *different* "characters" for characters that are special to make.  These
> are not the same characters as the user wants to appear in her recipe.
> Make is using one character, $[ ], to represent a space that's part of a
> word, and A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT character, " " or ASCII 32, to
> represent a space that's a word delimiter.  Ditto with the other special
> characters.
> 
> This is not just an internal encoding concept: it's visible in makefiles
> and I think people writing makefiles should think about it exactly like
> this.  I don't think it will be possible for make to just "do the right
> thing" and keep makefile authors from having to understand this (if they
> want to support filenames with special characters).
> 
> Any blurring of the lines between these two characters would lead to
> more confusion than the alternative, IMO.

I'm questioning the need to have this distinction exposed to
user-land.