RFC: rename symbols to m4symbols

[Eric Blake]

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"symbols" is an English word, but was added to m4-1.4o as a macro that
takes 0 arguments (even worse, the 1.4o manual documented the new macro,
but NEWS did not).  This has the potential to break preprocessing of
English text that used to work with m4 1.4.x, when someone upgrades and
makes no changes to their command line.  I propose renaming the macro to
"m4symbols" (and we should probably document a policy that any future
macro added in the gnu module that take 0 arguments either be in the "m4"
or "__" namespace, such as the __program__ macro added in m4 1.4.6).
m4sugar currently handles this case by mapping symbols to "m4_symbols",
consistent with the other remappings it handles, so a rename visible in m4
2.0 would slightly impact autoconf; there are other macros that m4sugar
still needs to pick up from CVS M4, such as changeresyntax.

Also, is it worth putting the macros in the load module in a proper
namespace?  "modules", "load", and "unload" are all English words, but at
least with CVS m4, you have to explicitly request "-m load" at the command
line to enable them.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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