Re: Gnu m4 ver1.4 manual (typos & questions)

[Yuji Minejima]

Hi, KONNICHIWA Vaughan SAN,
thank you for your reply.

> Is it still in texinfo?

Yes, the translated manual is still in texinfo format.
It's currently put on my web site
<http://homepage1.nifty.com/bmonkey/doc/index-en.html>
and on GNU JDoc cvs tree
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gnujdoc/gnujdoc.html> which is a central
 archive of Japanese translations of GNU documents.


> If so, would you like me to 
> distribute it with the sources from gnu.org?  M4 1.5 is due Real Soon Now 
> (TM)...

Thank you for your offer.  Since we have GNU JDoc project, I think
it'd be better if you could mention its URL somewhere in the m4 source
distribution.  That way, you wouldn't have to think about things like which
version of translated documentation you should bundle, etc.



> > And I felt the following part of the explanation for changequote is
> > somewhat ambiguous because there is no way to omit the first argument
> > while providing the first argument.
I'm sorry I made a mistake, the correct sentence should be
"There is no way to omit the first argument while providing the SECOND
argument."


That is,

  changequote(,bar)

is calling changequote macro with 2 arguments (not 1), the first argument is
null string and the second one is "bar".

The original sentence describing changequote in the m4 1.4 manual is as
follows,

  changequote(opt START, opt END)
  
  where START is the new start-quote delimiter and END is the new
  end-quote delimiter.  If any of the arguments are missing, the default
  quotes (``' and `'') are used instead of the void arguments.


The reason I thought the above description was ambiguous is that I
read Single Unix spec's description of changequote 
<http://www.opengroup.org/public/pubs/online/7908799/xcu/m4.html>
which says,

  changequote

   The changequote macro sets the begin- and end-quote strings. With no
  arguments, the quote strings are set to the default values.
  With a single argument, that argument becomes the begin-quote
  string and the newline character becomes the end-quote string. With
  two arguments, the first argument becomes the begin-quote string and
  the second argument becomes the end-quote string. Systems support
  quote strings of at least five characters.

which is verbose, but lists all the possible cases.

I wasn't familiar with m4 when I started to translate the manual,
so I guess once you get accustomed to m4's argument passing protocol this
confusion might not occur that much.


Regards,
 Yuji

-- 
my personal page   http://homepage1.nifty.com/bmonkey/index-en.html