Re: bug report

[Akim Demaille]

>>>>> "Pavel" == Pavel Roskin <address@hidden> writes:

Pavel> To be strict, the testsuite doesn't guarantee it because macros
Pavel> can expand differently dependent e.g. on the number of
Pavel> arguments.

I agree.

Pavel> Anyway, I agree with your decision.

I agree too :)



Pavel> I can, but it may slow down Autoconf very significantly.

This must not happen (by default), it's already way too slow on
significant configure.ins.

Pavel> Every macro defined by AC_DEFUN should add some markers to the
Pavel> text it expands to, e.g.

Pavel> AC_FOO -> {__ac_marker}Checking foo...

Pavel> Every macro defined by AC_DEFUN should also be able to check
Pavel> the existance of those markers in the arguments and report an
Pavel> error if they are found.

Pavel> This way, AC_BAR(AC_FOO) will have {__ac_marker} in $1 which
Pavel> can be detected by regexp().

Pavel> All those markers will be removed from the text by autoconf.sh,
Pavel> maybe in finalize.awk

I'm not sure this is a good way to go, because it is valid, and
desirable, in some case *not* to quote the argument.

I think a better scheme, although not exactly aiming at the same
problem, will be to be able to ``prototype'' the macros, i.e., state
how many and what kind of arguments are expected.

In fact, it'd be great if we could abstract this problem from
Autoconf, and implement it directly into GNU M4.

Pavel> This can be slow, but if we receive more reports of this kind
Pavel> we may be forced to impove "fool protection" at the expence of
Pavel> people running Autoconf (not configure!) on i386 and Sun-3.

I think that the problem is also due to the fact that the
documentation has never stressed enough the importance of the
quotation.  In my opinion, one of the significant changes brought by
2.50 is precisely the uniformization of the quoting style, and its
documentation.