To avoid the implicits: make --no-builtin-rules --no-builtin-variables at least as of: GNU Make 3.82 I think that at this point, with 37-some years worth o

To avoid the implicits: make --no-builtin-rules --no-builtin-variables at least as of: GNU Make 3.82 I think that at this point, with 37-some years worth of Makefiles on the planet, a competitive replacement for make with a different syntax or format would need to provide tools to process or translate old & new formats to the other format, as Perl did with the (uni-directional) a2p and s2p tools for awk and sed scripts, so that people considering a transition could make the leap more easily and with greater confidence.