Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 10:00:36 -0800 From: Marcel Moolenaar <marcel@xcllnt.net> To: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> Cc: Andy Fawcett <andy@athame.co.uk> Subject: Re: HEADS UP: Latest round of bsd.*.mk changes Message-ID: <20040204180036.GA46120@ns1.xcllnt.net> In-Reply-To: <20040204084200.GA19129@xor.obsecurity.org> References: <1075871381.76993.21.camel@shumai.marcuscom.com> <200402041012.01057.andy@athame.co.uk> <1075883393.76993.63.camel@shumai.marcuscom.com> <20040204084200.GA19129@xor.obsecurity.org>
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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@xcllnt.net
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