Makefiles are useful only with compiled programming languages.
But makefiles in general are employed even when there is no
programming involved at all.;)
Other than of course makefile scripting. If you care to call that
programming at all.
As I said before make is used to download, extract, create a package
and install ports/packages in the
BSD world.
It is actually BSD make which is different from GNU make just like
even ls is different.
Now for a language like javascript which is pure interpreted make is
not useful.
make is used for perl although perl is an interpreted language.
Ever heard of perl -c ? Perl also has a compilation stage.
But my guess is that makefiles are useful in perl CPAN module
compilation due to Perl XS which uses C
bindings.
makefiles are used to just compile first,then link and so on.
It recursively descends down directories and compiles a whole project.
But a usual project is a mix of several programming languages and
several components.
One top level make may invoke several things in between.
-Girish
--
Gayatri Hitech
http://gayatri-hitech.com
