Re: justification for AC_LANG_ASSERT?

[Steven G. Johnson]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, Akim Demaille wrote:
> Steven, you don't seem to read my messages in another thread,
> precisely related to this:
> 
> http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf-patches/2003-10/msg00116.html

Akim, the only justification you give there is that you had called an
AC_FC macro in a file that you wanted to just be testing Fortran 77.  But
if you want to catch that sort of "error", you need to put asserts in
essentially every macro (from AC_PROG_CC onwards...), which I don't think
anyone would thank you for.

If the name of the macro contains F77/FC/CC/C/CXX, I should think that is
enough of a clue to the user, in general, that it applies to a particular
language.  The additional "error" checking of puting a language assert, in
my opinion, doesn't outweigh the incredible inconvenience of forcing the
user to call push/pop when it is completely superfluous.

Put another way, we have to assume that if the user calls a macro, then
that is the macro they want.  Otherwise, we might as well add new macros

AC_I_REALLY_MEAN_TO_CALL_THIS([AC_FOO])
AC_FOO
AC_OK_I_AM_DONE_WITH_THIS([AC_FOO])

Steven