On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 03:05:27PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> 
> Personally I think that "continued comments" are bogus and _dangerous_.
> 
> A backslash in a comment is just a backslash.  It has no meaning,
> special or otherwise.
> 
> After all that's all the manual promises:
> 
> COMMENTS
>      Comments begin with a hash (`#') character, anywhere but in a shell com-
>      mand line, and continue to the end of the line.

I was reading this bit:

     There are seven different types of lines in a makefile: file dependency
     specifications, shell commands, variable assignments, include statements,
     conditional directives, for loops, and comments.

     In general, lines may be continued from one line to the next by ending
     them with a backslash (`\').  The trailing newline character and initial
     whitespace on the following line are compressed into a single space.

(From the automake point of view, Alexandre added code to put missing '#'s
in, so it doesn't matter either way - add a note to the manpage, or follow
SUS..)

Cheers,

Patrick