Re: Problems with echo. (echo period)

[Aaron Shatters]

>As for the "echo." case, it's just a bizarre consequence of cmd
>command-line parsing (there are many more manifestations of that, and
>others have pointed out some of them).

Documentation from microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/echo.mspx?mfr=true

This is not a bizarre consequence... this is a documented use case suggested by 
the supplier of this shell.  I agree that cmd.exe command parsing is "weirdo", 
and that we should not take advantage of, or support, strange things that 
happen to work because of of this weirdo-ness.  However, this happens to be how 
the echo command was designed to work... not just a "strange corner(s) in cmd". 
 This is a documented shell built-in.

>I don't think there's a very
>large demand for supporting that in Make, and even if there is, I
>don't plan on working on that any time soon.

>My reasoning is that supporting such weirdo parsing is a maintenance
>burden.  The way Make parses the commands now cannot be easily
>modified to cater to these strange corners in cmd.

I suppose that I am not in the position to dispute this argument.  I can say 
with certainty that allowing for this one case would not be a difficult change, 
because I've already done it... but I am not familiar with all of the other 
nuances of cmd.exe that might increase the maintenance burden if the 
flood-gates were opened because of fixing this one issue.

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