make: .for loops in commands

[Edgar Fuß <ef%math.uni-bonn.de@localhost>]

Is there, in make, any sane way to assemble a single shell command using 
.for loops and .if conditionals? I want to do something along the lines of

target:
	{\
.for i in ${list}
		echo ${i};\
.done
	} > ${.TARGET}

(of course it's more complicated than the example, wehere I could simply 
echo ${list}, it involves nested loops and conditionals)

I could do

target:
	echo >${.TARGET}
.for i in ${list}
		echo ${i} >>${.TARGET}
.done

but that's certainly more expensive.

I could also try to use the :@ loop construct and :U, :D and :? modifiers, 
but given the structure of the loops and conditional expressions, that's 
going to become unreadable at best.

From reading the man page, I was under the impression that (provided I don't 
use -B)

target:
	exec >${.TARGET}
.for i in ${list}
		echo ${i}
.done

would work, but make calls one shell per echo line.

I also guess it won't work to assemble the shell command into a make variable 
and execute that due to the quoting hell that's going to be.