HEADS UP: Latest round of bsd.*.mk changes

Marcel Moolenaar marcel at xcllnt.net
Wed Feb 4 10:01:15 PST 2004


On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 12:42:00AM -0800, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> 
> I'm becoming concerned at the proliferation of variables being added
> to b.p.m - the trend towards macro'izing every conceivable shell
> command used by ports is another one I'm uncomfortable with (why?).

What about:

Probably because the end result is more complex than a programming
language. Macros are created to solve a complex problem and tend to
deal with borderi cases as a side-effect. This makes their behaviour
incomprehensible. For a handful of those macros there's no problem,
because the abstraction is not getting in the way. But if everything
is to be expressed with macros, the expression power of the resulting
language is highly non-orthogonal and irregular and macros tend to
end up having weird dependencies among each other...

-- 
 Marcel Moolenaar	  USPA: A-39004		 marcel at xcllnt.net


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