It is straight-forward to add a new function, but I do not like to
hard-code specialized functions like that. Hence, here is another
feature, user-defined function. This works as a textual shorthand
with parameterization.
A user-defined function is defined by using the = operator, and can
be referenced in the same way as built-in functions. A user-defined
function in Make is referenced like $(call my-func,arg1,arg2), but I
omitted the 'call' to make the syntax shorter.
The definition of a user-defined function contains $(1), $(2), etc.
in its body to reference the parameters. It is grammatically valid
to pass more or fewer arguments when calling it. We already exploit
this feature in our makefiles; scripts/Kbuild.include defines cc-option
which takes two arguments at most, but most of the callers pass only
one argument.
By the way, a variable is supported as a subset of this feature since
a variable is "a user-defined function with zero argument". In this
context, I mean "variable" as recursively expanded variable. I will
add a different flavored variable in the next commit.