Does CMake has something like % substitution support from Make?

Question

I need a chain of file processing in my build-process. Workflow can be easily specified and built around a filename, only extension changes, like file.a -> file.b -> file.c. So, it's clearly a case for Make's declarative syntax. But as I see, for CMake this will look like an explicit *add_custom_command* for each file for each step of processing.

So, the question is if CMake supports substitutions like % from Make, so that only general rules for each step of processing would be required.

I imagine this like:

add_custom_command(OUTPUT %.b
    COMMAND convert %.a > %.b
    DEPENDS %.a)

add_custom_command(OUTPUT %.c
    COMMAND convert %.b > %.c
    DEPENDS %.b)

Answer 1

You could use macros.

A simple example:

MACRO( TEST )
MESSAGE ( "HELLO ${ARGV}" )
ENDMACRO( TEST )

TEST("WORLD")

Answer 2

No, CMake does not have any support for patterns. People typically use macros as a workaround.

People don't use CMake because of the elegant syntax and its expressiveness.