On Mon, Dec 9, 2024 at 12:11 AM Paul Smith <psm...@gnu.org> wrote: > I reviewed the previous (lengthy) email thread before looking at this > patch.
I guess you mean the thread that at some point was titled "math expressions" [1]. Was there any conclusion there? At some point it gravitated to a shell/Posix-style expr [2] function. There were issues with most, if not all, proposals and personally I still think arithmetic operators may be too much feature creep altogether. So far, much of GNU Make's functionality could be summarized as a fancy rewriting language that produces commands to be run. The compare function introduced around the same time as the previous thread is already challenging this viewpoint, but it could still be considered an enhanced conditional operator. These newly proposed functions really add "numbers" as a supported interpretation of variable values (Bash has the same). Doesn't GNU Make already have Guile integration for cases where you want not just a rewriting engine? I know that Make is already Turing complete, so this argument doesn't hold in the theoretical sense, but still I can imagine more non-idiomatic uses of arithmetic operators than idiomatic ones. > I don't see the advantage in creating this special case. If someone > wants the negation of a value, wouldn't they just write "-$V" instead > of "$(sub $V)"? This feels similar to many concerns raised in the original thread four years ago. In this particular case, "-$V" could result in two consecutive minus signs, which is probably not what we want. What I remember from the original thread is that we first needed a good proposal. I'm afraid the existence of the implementation suggested now sidesteps the discussion on what functionality is actually desirable. Regards, - Jouke [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-make/2020-05/msg00070.html [2] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/expr.html
