RE: Problems with echo. (echo period)

[Dave Korn]

On 24 April 2007 15:26, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> There's that plus the fact that the whole reason for this, AFAICT, is to
> somehow make your makefile output a blank line.  Is that really a common
> enough task worth the cost of maintaining a kludge?

  Well, it's often no mere cosmetic.  I use make to autogenerate a lot of
header files containing macros with array initialisers, etc.; it's a whole lot
easier to output every line with a trailing '\' and leave a blank line
afterword than to special-case the final item in your list.

> Then there's the added support cost of answering questions like "Well,
> you already added a dot to echo, what's the harm of adding a 'dir.',
> too?"

  Yes, absolutely my point about how kludges build up on time.  (If I can feep
further than creatures, it is because I have kludged on the shoulders of
giants.. um, or something).
 
> To me, this clearly falls into the domain of "do it the right way or
> don't do it at all".  If there were hundreds of people asking for this
> feature I might feel differently but given that this is the first time
> I've seen this particular problem surface in nine months of monitoring
> this mailing list, I don't see why we should add a kludge here.

  Particularly given the trivial and easily-availble workarounds.

    cheers,
      DaveK
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