[cmake-developers] if (FOO == BAR) ...

[Brad King]

On 03/14/2013 03:47 PM, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> I pushed the AddEqualOperator to stage, it adds the == operator to if(), which 
> simply string-compares the both arguments, with no variable lookup (... which 
> can lead to unwanted effects when using STREQUAL)
> 
> Does that look like a good solution ?

It adds yet another interface to the if() command.  Syntactically
the name "==" tells me nothing about how the comparison is done,
and we don't have typed values.  Once "==" is there people will
want <,<=,>,>=,etc. and they will all have the same ambiguity as
to how values like "0" v. "0.0" are handled.

I'd rather have a policy to drop the auto-lookups for quoted
arguments so that

 if("${x}" STREQUAL "${y}")

works as expected.  Also the keywords like TARGET, EXISTS, etc.
should work only when not quoted.

-Brad