synchronous M-x compile?

[Dan Davison <davison@stats.ox.ac.uk>]

M-x compile runs the compile process asynchronously, and e.g.
(compile "make -k") always evaluates as true, even if there are
compilation errors. Is there a simple way to alter this behaviour so
that compile happens synchronously, and evaluates as false if there
are errors? I realise that one approach could be based on something
like (shell-command "make"), but ideally I'd like not to lose all the
other functionality in compile.el.

As an aside, I guess that the motivation for asynchronous compile is
the time taken for compilation? This has obviously decreased a lot
during the life of emacs and I wonder what the distribution of compile
times looks like now for emacs users? I only work on simple, small
projects for which compilation takes a few seconds, and so I'm happy
to not start another task during that time. But perhaps I have no idea
how long compilation takes for those working on large projects?

Dan

-- 
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~davison