Re: backslash does not simply continue line?

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2012-03-06 at 15:56 -0500, David Boyce wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 3:44 PM, Paul Smith <address@hidden> 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.