Re: Why call is not calling like native primitives? even when var is otherwise undef?

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2018-05-21 at 08:20 +0200, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
> For instance, if there’s an occurence of $(several words) in the
> makefile, and the variable “several words” isn’t defined (that’s not a
> natural thing to do anyway), taking its firstword, and being equivalent
> to $(call several,words) might improve readability, be simpler,
> etc. then why not?

For a long time it was perfectly legal to create variable names that
contained whitespace; this would work:

  some variable = foo

  all: ; @echo $(some variable)

gives you "foo".  A few releases ago I made it illegal to create
variable names containing spaces so the above makefile no longer works.
 My intention at that time was to allow a shorthand for "call" such as
you suggest, but I haven't made that change yet.