It's not the primary task of make to handle procedure calls with
parameters, combined with lexical scoping, therefore the code does not
look as straight-forward or clean as in other programming languages. It
feels more like squeezing a programming problem from the imperative
world into the world of declarative dependencies.
A more idiomatic way of implementing this puzzle should be as a
dependency graph since that's both the natural structure of the puzzle
and the primary domain of make. Something like having a main target
"hanoi-5" that depends on intermediate targets of the form
"move-1.2.3.4.5-_._._._._-_._._._._", each representing a single
configuration of the stacks. These targets could be generated
dynamically. A benefit of this implementation would be that the puzzle
could be resumed from an arbitrary configuration, just just from the
initial configuration.
rillig