Re: Idea: Allow $(name ...) as an abbrevation of $(call name ....)

[Paul Smith]

On Sun, 2019-06-09 at 18:53 -0400, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> There's also no need for it. If "name" is followed by whitespace it *cannot*
> be a POSIX variable reference, because POSIX doesn't allow that.
> 
> Solution:
> Just allow $(name ...), where 1+ whitespace follows name, to be considered
> the same as $(call name...).
> 
> I would allow $(no-parameters ), with a space after the name and no 
> parameters,
> though in practice I don't think that's very useful.  If you really wanted 
> that (why?),
> I think $(call no-parameters) would be clearer as a call, and $(no-parameters)
> seems more useful :-).

It's true that POSIX doesn't allow this, but actually it was legal in
make for a long time.

This suggestion is something I've thought of doing myself, and I've
been working towards it for a while now, by first removing support for
variable names containing spaces.

Probably it's OK to finally implement this, at this point.