Most popular folder on Windows is "My documents", it has a space at least in some Windows versions. Make doesn't support such paths: http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?712
VBScript works better on Windows, IMO. Also works out of the box on all Windows versions since at least 2000 (on Win9x it was shipped with IE).
Not really... not since XP, anyway. Unless you have a space in your username (which is a terrible idea for many other reasons), your "Documents" path is C:\Users\JohnSmith\Documents. "Program Files" is pretty much the only important path which is likely to have spaces, and your makefiles (hopefully!) don't need to touch that.
On Windows, it's not up to me to decide where users will keep my stuff, and where it will work. Users decide.
For a software to work fine on Windows, it must support spaces in files and paths. Also Unicode in files and paths.
VBScript does, GNU Make doesn't.
> which is a terrible idea for many other reasons
If you use make to setup stuff, it's very possible you'll need to access "c:\Users\All Users" which does contain space in username. Also "c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files" which contain more than one.
That is entirely correct and really the most glaring downside of Make. In my opinion: If you have spaces in your dependency names, just stay away from Make as far as possible.
Long paths were introduced in Windows NT in 1993, VC6 released in 1998.
I’ve just installed Visual C++ 6.0 Professional on a WinXP VmWare machine. Took less than a minute, BTW — modern SSDs are awesome. The default installation path under program files also contain spaces, it’s "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98"
VBScript works better on Windows, IMO. Also works out of the box on all Windows versions since at least 2000 (on Win9x it was shipped with IE).