Re: Clarification on :::= Variable Assignment Operator?

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2022-02-04 at 11:50 -0500, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> You can blame me :-).
> 
> There's a need in makefiles to assign variables (macros) so that the
> expansions happen once instead of recursively in every use.
> Large makefiles start to hit exponential slowdowns if you can't deal with it.
> Unfortunately, GNU make and BSD make's := have significantly
> different semantics, making standardization a challenge.
> The proposed solution was to create ::= with GNU make := semantics,
> so that there would be an operation that would work the same everywhere.

::= was an alias for GNU make's long-standing :=.  That's been
available for quite a while.

Jon is asking about :::= which is a recent addition, demanded by Joerg
last fall.