Re: m4sugar update

[Eric Blake]

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According to Akim Demaille on 8/27/2008 2:58 AM:
> 
> I have not looked at the details, but there is something that makes
> shiftn(3, $@) and shift3($@) different.  If in the branch
> candidates/make-symbol you change the shift3 into a shiftn, then
> "_build/tests/bison examples/variant.yy" loops forever.

I only know of one difference between the macros.  shiftn validates that
there are enough arguments to shift, so shiftn(3,$@) throws an assertion
unless $@ contains more arguments than the shift count, and it should be
impossible to call it with 0, 1, 2, or 3 arguments.  On the other hand,
shift3 does no validation; if $@ contains 0, 1, or 2, or 3 arguments,
shift3 silently results in an empty string (which, if you called shift3
after a comma, still results in 1 argument for the next round).  I'm not
sure what you are using as your check to end recursion, nor how using
shift3 could cause an infinite loop, unless you are looping even when
shift3 resulted in an empty string; but this seems like the shiftn variant
would have asserted.

I haven't tried to build the candidates/make-symbol branch, but I suppose
I can look into this further.  Do you know which macro is looping
infinitely?  A quick 'git grep m4_shiftn origin/candidates/make-symbol'
didn't turn up any use of m4_shiftn outside of m4sugar.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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