[bug #67265] $(file) in commands is executed too early

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #67265 (group make):


> We're not going to make $(file...) a special case that expands differently
> than everything else.

I'm surprised you insist on this.  There is plenty of precedent for using the
same notation for expandable and non-expandable primitives: both Lisp and TeX
do this and nobody minds.

If you are determined that anything that looks like $(...) or ${...} *must be*
consumed by expansion, you could get the same effect by having $(file
REDIRECTION, CONTENTS) expand to a different sequence of characters, which
would then be recognized by the command processor as a built-in command.  For
example


goal:
        $(file > dest, contents)

could become

goal:
        //gnumake-builtins/file > dest contents


I think this is an inferior alternative to special casing $(file) within
commands, though, because it means inventing a second construct like
//gnumake-builtins/ and worrying about what happens if someone writes that
manually.  Not to mention that the contents now have to be quoted somehow.

> There's an argument to be made that the way make handles expansion of recipes
> is wrong, and that it should expand each line in a recipe separately just
> before it's going to be executed, instead of all lines being expanded up
> front.

I would also be fine with that as a resolution.  If there is a regular stream
of people being surprised by the existing behavior of expanding all lines up
front, that suggests pretty strongly that nobody actually *wants* the existing
behavior.

p.s. I do insist that this is a bug, not a feature request.  The existing
behavior is strictly less useful than the requested behavior, and surprising
to boot.


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