cross-compiling on OS X, make menuconfig fails

[timur@freescale.com]

I'm trying to cross-compile a PowerPC kernel from an Intel OS X system. 
  I've almost got it working, except "make menuconfig" dies.  It says 
I'm missing ncurses:

  *** Unable to find the ncurses libraries or the
  *** required header files.
  *** 'make menuconfig' requires the ncurses libraries.

However, I do not think that ncurses is the real problem, since I do 
have ncurses installed.  I think the real problem is that the 
check-lxdialog.sh is trying to execute this code:

echo -e ' #include CURSES_LOC \n main() {}' | gcc 
'-DCURSES_LOC=<ncurses.h>' -DLOCALE -DKBUILD_NO_NLS -lncurses -xc - -o 
.lxdialog.tmp

And the compiler is failing with this output:

<stdin>:1: error: syntax error before ‘-’ token
<stdin>:1: error: stray ‘#’ in program

So something strange is going on.  Has anyone been able to cross-compile 
from an Intel Mac running OS X?