Iterating over lists in Makefiles?

Question

I find I\'m writing a lot of Makefiles that could be cleaned up with the use of n-tuple lists. But I can\'t find any way to do this properly (and cleanly). So far I

Answer 1

Thanks for the hints -- after some hacking I think this is more what I was hoping for:

XYZs = \
    dog.c:pull_tail:bark  \
    duck.c:chase:quack \
    cow.c:tip:moo

all:
    @- $(foreach XYZ,$(XYZs), \
        $(eval X = $(word 1,$(subst :, ,$(XYZ)))) \
        $(eval Y = $(word 2,$(subst :, ,$(XYZ)))) \
        $(eval Z = $(word 3,$(subst :, ,$(XYZ)))) \
        \
        $(CC) $X -o bully/$Y ; \
        ln bully/$Y sounds/$Z ; \
    )

Can anyone do better?