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Yes, which leads to beautiful things like `LIST_SEPARATOR` [1]. Lists in CMake are just strings with ';' as item separator.

All this is just a gentle slap on the wrist for programming in your build system. Or doing something weird like optimizing a CMake-language JSON parser for performance [2].

1: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.16/module/ExternalProject.ht...

2: https://github.com/sbellus/json-cmake/pull/3

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> All this is just a gentle slap on the wrist for programming in your build system

That's an awfully polite way of saying Yes, the CMake scripting language is indeed terrible.

It's meant to be used for complex package-detection logic. CMake Find modules can run hundreds of lines. It's not unreasonable to expect proper support for arrays, proper functions that can return values, a sane syntax, etc.

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