Re: Little documentation bug

[Eric Blake]

On 08/13/2014 06:06 PM, Florian Mayer wrote:
> Hello m4 Team,
> 
> i think i have found a little bug in the latest
> version of the m4 manual!
> 

Thanks for the report.  However...

> define(`foo', `Macro `FOO'.')
> ⇒
> changequote(`', `')
> ⇒
> foo
> ⇒Macro `FOO'.
> `foo'
> ⇒`Macro `FOO'.'
> changequote(`,)
> ⇒
> foo
> ⇒Macro FOO.

Did you actually test this?  Running 'make check' does just that, and
verifies that the manual matches actual operation.  This really is what
gets output.

> 
> ==end==
> 
> That last line has to be
> 
> ⇒Macro `FOO'.

That is not the output for this example.  Remember, the way m4 works is
that any time a macro is expanded, the expansion is rescanned for
macros.  So functionally, you are at a point in time where the quotes
are restored to their defaults of ` and ' (changequote defaults the end
quote to ' rather than empty).  The parser read:

foo

and expanded that to

Macro `FOO'.

then rescans; during the rescan, it sees that Macro is a potential name
but has no expansion defined, sees a space, then sees a string
(stripping the quotes before outputting the string contents FOO), then
sees a dot, for a final output of:

Macro FOO.

as correctly documented.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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