Re: Internal representations (was: Re: Possible solution for special characters in makefile paths)

> From: Paul Smith <[email protected]>
> Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2014 19:38:17 -0500
> 
> This thread is intended to discuss how quoted strings might be
> represented internal to make, assuming that they are encoded in some way
> and not just left as they appear in the input makefile as Eli suggests.

As already written, I suggest to leave this issue for later.  It is
less important than the other ones.

> I realized I may not have made clear my thinking behind this.  Doing
> away with this requirement gives a more flexible and backward compatible
> solution, but requires a lot more effort.  Maybe that's a feasible
> trade-off, so I'd like opinions about it.

Personally, I don't like it.  It's true that it might mean less
refactoring, but I think that's largely an illusory advantage.
Strings are not very complex objects, they have only a small number of
operations; once those operations are coded and debugged, the rest
should be relatively easy: basically, replace libc functions and
access through pointers with specialized function calls.

By contrast, my experience is that encoding some characters as other
characters eventually tends to leak into the outside world, and then
causes trouble.  It also sounds unclean solution, but that's my
personal opinion, and YMMV.