On 10 27, Mike Long wrote:
> >From: Luke Mewburn <lm@cs.rmit.edu.au>
> >Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 16:46:03 +1100
> >
> >Whilst investigating a PR, I noticed that we don't have standard
> >set of rules for compiling objective C source files (``.m'' suffix)
> 
> >I propose that the following changes are made to the tree:
> >
> >- file: share/mk/sys.mk
> 
> While this code looks fine, I don't think it should go into sys.mk.
> Unlike the other suffixes in sys.mk, .m does not unambiguously
> identify Objective-C files; as a result, users using .m for something
> else might get a nasty surprise after they install 1.3.  I would have
> no problem with adding the rules to bsd.sys.mk, so that only makefiles
> that explicitly use the bsd.*.mk system are affected.

  I would argue, on the contrary, that objective-c, like c, pascal, fortran,
etc., is a generic programming language, and what's more, is supplied with
the system, so it *should* be supported in sys.mk.  In contrast, Matlab and
Mathematica are not at all generic languages, but specific applications that
happen to support programming interfaces, and users of these can reasonably
be expected to override the system-supplied support for objective-c if they
wish to use make for their projects.  Indeed, I suspect it is extremely
rare for users of Mathematica or Matlab to use make for those applications,
since most prefer the interactive interfaces.