Switch-case block inside define keyword in a single logical line in a makefile

This is the code excerpt from ghc.mk, part of Haskell source compilation. I find it different, because the author has chosen to write one function block in a single line. Is it a common practice in writing makefiles?

And I like to put echo statements in each one of the case handles for debugging, but with the current setup, I am not able to and make interprets my echo statements as shell commands.

define installLibsTo
        $(call INSTALL_DIR,$2)
        for i in $1; do \
                case $$i in \
                  *.a) \
                    $(call INSTALL_DATA,$(INSTALL_OPTS),$$i,$2); \
                    $(RANLIB_CMD) $2/`basename $$i` ;; \
                  *.dll) \
                    $(call INSTALL_PROGRAM,$(INSTALL_OPTS),$$i,$2) ; \
                    $(STRIP_CMD) $2/`basename $$i` ;; \
                  *) \
                  $(call INSTALL_DATA,$(INSTALL_OPTS),$$i,$2); \
                  esac; \
    done
endef