Are these “makefiles” the same thing as the Unix “make” tool uses?
No; they’re related only in name and slightly in purpose. The Unix “make” tool is a very general system for declarative, dependency-based scripting; roughly speaking, it is to the Unix command shell as Prolog is to C, if that makes any sense. The Unix “make” tool can be difficult to learn and use, because it combines a somewhat inside-out conceptual model with a syntax based almost entirely on puncutation marks (and what’s more, not only is whitespace significant, but different kinds of whitespace – specifically spaces and tabs – have different meanings). The TADS 3 “makefile” is really nothing more than a file containing the compiler options. However, the name isn’t entirely unjustified, because the TADS 3 compiler does do dependency-based builds (see the next question), although the dependency rules are all built in to the compiler. How does the compiler know which source files need to be recompiled? The TADS 3 compiler figures out which files need to be recompiled by looking at the
