"LOADLIBES" versus "LDLIBS"?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm almost embarrassed to ask this, but i was going over the list of
implicit rules with make-3.80 on my FC3 system, and i'm curious about
the rationale behind the numerous implicit link rules:

        $(LINK.o) $^ $(LOADLIBES) $(LDLIBS) -o $@
        $(LINK.c) $^ $(LOADLIBES) $(LDLIBS) -o $@
        $(LINK.cc) $^ $(LOADLIBES) $(LDLIBS) -o $@
        $(LINK.C) $^ $(LOADLIBES) $(LDLIBS) -o $@
        $(LINK.cpp) $^ $(LOADLIBES) $(LDLIBS) -o $@
        ... etc etc ...

  is there a rationale for having two different load lib variables?
is there a philosophical difference between how they're supposed to be
used?  (every single implicit rule, without exception, refers to them
both so the implicit rules certainly don't effectively distinguish
between them.)

  and do i really want to know who originally decided to spell it
"LOADLIBES"? :-)

rday