A question on C programming style

[Alex Martelli]

scs at hstbme.mit.edu (Steve Summit) writes:
	...
:I gather that the "touch" trick is fairly widely used, so I
:suppose it must work, but I can't say if it has any real
:practical drawbacks (other than losing the "real" modification
:time, and the philosophical objections).

Well, this trick (the "foo.h: bar.h; touch foo.h" approach to
nested include handling in makefiles) surely has the potential
of causing a lot of extra work.  Makefiles are not just for
recompiling and linking sources; lots more things can depend 
on a text file than just a .o... the extra touching, depending
on what you do in your makefiles, may cause redundant attempts
at RCS check-ins of sources, redundant printouts of unmodified
sources, redundant backups to slow media, redundant broadcast
of sources over a net, redundant updating of tarfiles, etc etc.
I also share your dislike for having the last-modified date lose
information value in a long-listing.
Despite all this, it's just *so* convenient that I find myself
using it from time to time, mostly for makefiles intended for
short-term use...
-- 
Alex Martelli - CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Stalingrado 53, Bologna, Italia
Email: (work:) martelli at cadlab.sublink.org, (home:) alex at am.sublink.org
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