Re: a proposal from Akim

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Salut Akim!

It's good to hear from you my friend.  Hope all is well, and life
is being good to you.

Akim Demaille wrote:
>>>>"Gary" == Gary V Vaughan <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> 
>  > Stepan Kasal wrote:
>  >> Hi,
>  >> I'd like to stir the calm water here.
>  >> What do you think about the proposal formulated in
>  >> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2004-12/msg00095.html
>  >> ?
> 
>  > I think it sounds like an excellent idea, though we must be
>  > careful to support bugwards compatible quoting so that old
>  > scripts will continue to work, and so that GNU M4 can grok
>  > generic M4 scripts.
> 
>  > How do you think best to do that?
> 
>  > I think having quoted output by default is too deep a change,
>  > most likely adding a flag that can be toggled by a command-line
>  > switch and/or a runtime macro is cleanest...
> 
> But it provides no help for applications such as Autoconf that need
> backward compatibility.  So I'm neither in favor of options or
> builtins changing the behavior of builtins.

Do you mean that you want Autoconf 2.60 to work with either M4 2.0
or 1.4.x?  That is a really hard thing to achieve when proposing a
change to the functionality of core builtins.

> Rather I think we should have another set of builtins.

As in qregexp, qinclude, qifelse and so on?  Or as in an alternative
module with quoting builtins under the correct names?  Isn't the
first identical to define(`qregexp', qindir(`regexp', $@)), and the
second the same as /usr/local/bin/m4 --quote-builtin-output?

> While you're at it, the new regexp
> builtins should drop BRE dead, and use ERE too.

But what about code that relies on BRE regexps?

I get the impression I'm missing something here.  Can you explain
to me what interface you would like to have for quoting builtin
expansion text, and for EREs?  And if it's non-obvious how Autoconf
2.59 will continue to work if the user upgrades their M4 installation
to 2.0?

Sorry for being a bit slow on the uptake today =)O|

Cheers,
        Gary.
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan      ())_.  address@hidden,gnu.org}
Research Scientist   ( '/   http://tkd.kicks-ass.net
GNU Hacker           / )=   http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool
Technical Author   `(_~)_   http://sources.redhat.com/autobook

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature