On Tue, 2012-03-06 at 15:56 -0500, David Boyce wrote: > On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 3:44 PM, Paul Smith <psm...@gnu.org> wrote: > > The sucky thing about this behavior is that it's simple to add a space > > when you want one, but it's very hard to REMOVE one that's added for you > > automatically. But, it is what it is and can't be changed now. > > I know you're against new functions in general, but the obvious > solution is a function that squeezes out spaces, $(rmspace) or > whatever.
You can already do this, with a little setup: E := S := $E $E COMPRESSED = $(subst $S,,$(WORDS)) The problem is that this is not really useful. Very often you don't want to remove ALL space. You just want to be able to split a long line without introducing an extraneous space (but still preserving the non-extraneous ones). Back in the day when variable values were simple, it was no big deal to only split a line where whitespace was not important because variables contained lists of words. But now with complex functions written as macros, injudicious whitespace insertion can break your makefile. _______________________________________________ Help-make mailing list Help-make@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-make