Re: Using Guile in a Makefile

[John Olsson]

Thank you for getting back to me! The weird Unicode double quote characters are 
unfortunately an artifact of the text editor I used. I missed spotting that the 
editor automatically replaced my normal plain double quotes with the Unicode 
ones, I’m very sorry for that. :(

It turned out that the Guile support was not correctly built, but this put the 
finger on something else that I’m not sure is an intended feature or a bug.

What I’m talking about is that if you try using a non-existent function, say 
like I do in this makefile where fnord is not defined/known by GNU Make

> $ cat Makefile
> 
>  FOO = $(fnord "F N O R D")
>  $(info $$FOO is [$(FOO)])
> 
>  fnord: ; for i in "$(FOO)"; do echo $$i; done
> 
>  $ make


I get the exact same behavior I reported in my issue.

So my question is really if this behavior is documented somewhere? Shouldn’t 
GNU Make raise an error when a make file calls a non-existing function?

If it is not possible to have GNU Make by default raise an error when this 
happens due to backward compatibility concerns, what about a configuration 
option (command line and/or configurable from within makefile by setting some 
value)? 

If I had to choose between the two approaches I would prefer the one where you 
configure behavior from within makefile.

> 

> On 2 Jan 2023, at 06:28, Paul Smith <psmith@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2022-12-14 at 13:12 +0100, johol wrote:
>> FOO = $(guile (fnord “F N O R D”))
> 
> I'm not sure what environment you're using, but my version of Guile
> doesn't work with these special UTF-8 quote characters you're using
> here: “ and ”.
> 
> When I try to use them, and the sample makefile you've provided, I get
> all sorts of bizarre errors from the Guile interpreter.
> 
> If I replace these characters with standard ASCII double-quote
> characters " then it seems to work fine:
> 
>  $ cat Makefile
>  define FNORD
>  ;; Simple initial Guile-test
>  (define (fnord value)
>     value)
>  endef
> 
>  # Internalize the Guile code
>  $(guile $(FNORD))
> 
>  FOO = $(guile (fnord "F N O R D"))
>  $(info $$FOO is [$(FOO)])
> 
>  fnord: ; for i in "$(FOO)"; do echo $$i; done
> 
>  $ make
>  $FOO is [F N O R D]
>  for i in "F N O R D"; do echo $i; done
>  F N O R D
> 
> If you don't see this behavior you'll need to provide more details such
> as which version of Guile you compiled with.