#1153 Makefile continued comments (backslash) not highlighted as comment

[b2f9h203]

Minimal example

# Comment 1 \
PROJECT_PATH := ../test

The second line should be highlighted as a comment, but it is not (SciTE 3.6.2) which cost me quite some time to find.

‘#’ in a line of a makefile starts a comment. It and the rest of the line are ignored, except that a trailing backslash not escaped by another backslash will continue the comment across multiple lines.
https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Makefile-Contents.html

[Colomban Wendling]

This is highly subtle because it has different meaning inside a rule and outside, and accross Make implementations. Given the following example:

    # Comment 1 \
PROJECT_PATH := ../test

all:
    echo $(PROJECT_PATH)
    # echo hello \
    echo bye

.PHONY: all

With GNU make you get:

$ make -f /tmp/a.mk
echo 

# echo hello \
echo bye
bye

Note that you see bye in the output: L7 is not commented out, despite of the backslash on L6. This is because the comment is handled by the shell, which doesn't continue comments with backslashes (which Scintilla apparently actually also gets wrong, funnily enough).

OTOH, with BSD make you get:

$ pmake -f /tmp/a.mk
echo 

which suggests the comment inside the rule is handled by Make itself here, not the shell.

[Neil Hodgson]

The GNU versus BSD difference is unfortunate. There could be a property to choose between these.

[Neil Hodgson]

The makefile lexer is currently very simple and looks at each line separately with no inter-line state. Fixing this would require detecting or remembering comment state between lines.