[mnarayan01]

> though it’s probably a bug that whitespace in target names must be escaped, since it’s just one token that ends in a colon

It's perfectly fine for a rule to have multiple targets, e.g.

  output.txt error.txt: source
    build source > output.txt 2> error.txt

[eigengrau]

Interesting! So in that case one could defend the need for escaped whitespace. Still leaves automatic variables, I guess.

[mnarayan01]

Well it could be rewritten to use 0x1f (i.e. unit separator) to separate items. I mean it already has significant tabs. Though invariably people would be like "How is it acceptable for make to not support filenames which contain unit separators? It's 2020 guys, get with the program!"