Re: make: new modifyer :Y

[Anthony Mallet <anthony.mallet%laas.fr@localhost>]

On Wednesday, at 03:45, David Holland wrote:
|    A = "Yes"
|    B = "yes"
|     ...
|    A == B
| 
| suddenly the comparison is done as strings and becomes false, and the
| program logic fails, probably (by Murphy's Law) in a subtle and
| aggravating way.

I see (or at least I get an idea of what you mean).
I think that in this particular example the ambiguity comes from the fact that
the semantic of == is not well defined. Would you have two different operators
for strcmp() and yescmp(), there would probably be no problem, right?

Anyway, you've convinced me that this should be avoided in make context.

My original idea was not to go that far and just replace the interpretation of
a string in a boolean context (like in ".if ${X}") by the extended
interpretation of "Yes" "1" etc.

So == should always mean strcmp() and not try to interpret the strings, and
".if ${X} && ${Y}" should be "yes"-aware (because && uses boolean operands).
No matter how much you wire stuff down, the result of a &&-like operator is
always a boolean and can never be a string.

I think that's what Aleksey meant as well, but I'm not sure I haven't missed
the point as well :)