Of Editors and Makefiles (was Re: [CLUE-Tech] LINUX Programming Fundamentals)

[Sean LeBlanc]

On 10-07 09:02, Matt Gushee wrote:
<snip>
> But anyway, looking at the page I notice this passage regarding
> makefiles:
> 
>   The first character on the command line must be a tab. 
> 
> Are you *serious*? Not just whitespace, but a an actual tab character? I
> have to know what genius came up with that, and what they could have
> been thinking.

This was actually one of the things that compelled the author(s) of Ant[0]
to more or less re-invent the wheel. If you've ever taken C and you have a
good professor/instructor, they will usually note the tab issue as a gotcha
(along with others, like 0-based indexing, = vs. ==[1], the importance of
break in switch statements, etc)...even though Make isn't C, they are often
taught and used together.

[0] - Read about his/their motivations here:
http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/index.html.

[1] - One trick/style I've seen used to ensure that things aren't set when
you are actually trying to test for equality is to use "if (5 == foo)"
instead of "if (foo == 5)". The compiler should catch the first one if you
goof and put "if (5 = foo)" by accident.


Cheers,

-- 
Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at americanisp.net  
http://users.americanisp.net/~seanleblanc/
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