Makefile Assignments are Turing-Complete (2016)

[tannhaeuser]

http://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/04/30/

[jgrahamc]

However, since there’s no way to “slice” a value, subtraction isn’t possible.

That's incorrect. It's trivial to implement subtraction in GNU Make. I did it as part of my GMSL project: http://gmsl.sf.net/ In fact, you can implement a whole load of functions natively using GNU Make's macro language.

[tannhaeuser → jgrahamc]

Sure you can do all kinds of things using gmake but this is about POSIX make. See also [1] from the same author.

[1]: http://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/08/20/

[jgrahamc → tannhaeuser]

Very good point.