White Space Problems--Again

[Tom Browder]

I know there are words in the Make manual warning about insidious
white space at the ends of strings, but is there any reason that Make
couldn't do trimming during parsing?

I have a Makefile that I've used for a while.  Yesterday I added a
comment and the Makefile stopped working--all because I commented the
end of a definition line.

My first line looked like this (no space after 'gnu'):

  COMPS := gnu

Make reports the value of $(COMPS) as 'gnu'.

Then I added a comment to the line:

  COMPS := gnu # gfortran

Make reports the value of $(COMPS) as 'gnu ', not the same.

It took me a few minutes to figure out what was happening, and in my
stubbornness I added the $(strip) function later for a conditional to
enable me to leave the comment.

Is there any rationale for Make not trimming white space in that
situation?  Or ever?

Thanks.

-Tom

Tom Browder
Niceville, Florida
USA