Re: White Space Problems--Again

[Rick Flower]

Tom Browder wrote:
> 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?
>   
Tom -

I've run into that same problem with some of my Makefiles and put a big 
comment
in them (for others who might work on the same files) to not put 
comments on the
same line as a 'make directive' as it seems to mess things up.

HTH!

-- Rick