Re: autoconf 2.61: AC_DEFINE variable with parenthesis

[Steven G. Johnson]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> Andrey Simonenko <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > AC_DEFINE([DEF(x)], [somevalue])
>
> Ouch!  That's not supported, and I'm surprised you got it to work as
> well as it did.

It's not really so surprising.   Until you yourself rewrote it ten days 
ago (on Dec. 15), _AC_FC_WRAPPERS depended upon this capability, which 
means that it has worked in autoconf for over six years now.  (In fact, 
I believe I'm the one who originally patched autoconf to support macro 
arguments in AC_DEFINE.)

And _AC_FC_WRAPPERS is a perfect example of why AC_DEFINE should 
continue to support macros with arguments: your rewritten version 
requires 24 times as much config.h code as the previous version.  Some 
tasks are simply much easier with macro arguments, and since it produces 
a #define it is somewhat unnatural *not* to support arguments in AC_DEFINE.

My vote would be to keep this support, document it officially if 
necessary, and revert AC_FC_WRAPPERS to the previous 2-line config.h code.

Steven