> After ideas.  Given:

> LIST=one two
> LIST+= three

> how does one output one,two,three or one|two|three since make insists
> on separating the words with space.

Near as I can tell, one hacks on make. :-(  (Or resorts to kludges like
your example, though I think it may be easier to do something like
"@x='${LIST}'; echo "$x" | tr \  \|".)

On reading over var.c, it looks as though it would be fairly easy to
add something like, say, W ("whole") that says that further modifiers
should be applied with the whole value treated as a single string, with
spaces potentially embedded in it.  You just need to keep a state bit
and then frob VarModify to use it.

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