m4-discuss
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Unstrippable quotes [was FYI: 23-gary-doc-typos.patch]


From: Gary V. Vaughan
Subject: Re: Unstrippable quotes [was FYI: 23-gary-doc-typos.patch]
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 13:28:24 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312

Akim Demaille wrote:
Hi gary,

Salut Akim!

I would to hold the release of these macros, or to fix them asap: they
ought to return their argument *quoted*.  Actually, most m4 macros are
broken by design and should be duplicated with their quoting
equivalent.

For instance:

~/src/ace % cat /tmp/foo.m4                                      nostromo 16:09
define(`foo', `bar')
patsubst(`Foo', `F', `f')
~/src/ace % m4 /tmp/foo.m4                                       nostromo 16:09

bar


should display foo instead.  So I'd like to have epatsubst, eregexp
etc. return a quoted result.

I agree that this is a very real problem with m4 as a language, but I think Rene's solution of adding an extra syntax category for unstrippable quotes is a better, more backward compatible solution. If you (or anyone here!) wants to work on that patch, I'd be happy to help, and apply. But I want to concentrate on fixing the exported API for module writers and release 1.5 (actually, I'm thinking of calling the next release 2.0) ASAP.

Cheers,
        Gary.
--
  ())_. Gary V. Vaughan     gary@(oranda.demon.co.uk|gnu.org)
  ( '/  Research Scientist  http://www.oranda.demon.co.uk       ,_())____
  / )=  GNU Hacker          http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool  \'      `&
`(_~)_  Tech' Author        http://sources.redhat.com/autobook   =`---d__/





reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]