[bug #16505] Line-continuation backslashes are not stripped

[anonymous]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #16505 (project make):

Sorry; I wasn't too clear there. My point was, basically, that the POSIX
behavior sucks }:-)

Okay, so multi-line single-quoted strings now retain the backslashes. This
implies that removing the backslashes is all you need to do, that they are
superfluous, that the behavior is now Bourne-shell-like in that an open quote
automatically causes a continuation at the end of the line. But no; when you
remove the backslashes, there's no continuation at all, hence the EOF error.
So the situation is, backslashes are still your continuation character,
except that they're useless---unless you don't mind them showing up in the
string. So for all but a tiny minority of cases, multi-line single-quoted
strings in command scripts have been removed as an usable idiom in GNU Make.

I recognize the value of POSIX compliance, especially in regulatory contexts,
but the approach usually taken by other GNU tools when the POSIX behavior is
annoying/limiting is to enable it only when POSIXLY_CORRECT is defined. I'm
wondering why that wasn't done here, especially when the POSIX behavior
disallows a useful/common idiom, and breaks a number of existing makefiles.

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