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Re: [PATCH] @quote-args for multiple arguments


From: Sergey Poznyakoff
Subject: Re: [PATCH] @quote-args for multiple arguments
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2006 22:43:12 +0300

Hi Karl,

> I had intentionally left them undocumented since I didn't see that they
> served any purpose.

Oh, I see. I agree that @allow-recursion certainly did not, but as for
@quote-args, I'd rather argue. Indeed, arguments containing commas can
be handled either by escaping commas with a backslash or by using
@comma, but both methods look rather awkward to me. And not having to bother
about the nested commas looks like a nice feature to have, at least to
me:)  Other advantage of the proposed @quote-args fix is that it
makes such macros behave the same way when producing info and
dvi(pdf,etc) forms of output: without it one would have to carefully
construct a set of address@hidden ... @end iftex @ifinfo...' conditions.

> So when would anyone ever want to use @allow-recursion?

I agree, probably never. Would not it be better, then. to simply remove
it? Or at least, for the sake of programs that use it, to issue a
warning each time it is used, stating that it will be removed in future
versions. By the way, historically tar docs use both @allow-recursion
and @quote-args, that was one of the reasons I started to work on this
patch. Of course I am going to change to @rmacro, but this shows that,
although not documented, the commands might have propagated to some
projects.  
 
> Also, names containing - can't be defined properly in TeX, so I'm really
> not sure these bfox-isms should be documented.

Yes, I thought about it, too. I could see two solutions for this. First
of all, if @quote-args is found to be useful, it could be renamed to,
say, @quoteargs, or something similar. Otherwise, if it is useless, then
it will be better to remove it (again, after some phasing-out period),
making its behavior default.  What do you think?

> Your TeX definitions of
> \def\quote-arg and \def\allow-recursion are really defining \quote and
> \allow, as delimited macros.  Not a good idea.

Hmm, my bad, indeed. Thanks for pointing this out.
 
> But I'll at least see about installing the code improvements since you
> went to the trouble of working on it.  Thanks.

Well, not that I insist on them being installed, please do as you feel
will be better for the project. I simply felt rather incomfortable about
some differences in macro behavior when producing various kinds of
output as well as about the fact that not documented TeXinfo commands
were used by GNU tar. By the way, has anyone thought about improving
macro facilities of texinfo, so they become a bit closer to TeX? I mean,
for example, I often missed the possibility to write something like:

@macro foo{a,b}
@ifset b
..some code..
@else
..other code..
@end ifset   
@end macro

and other similar things. Do you think it would be useful?


> (And for the txi-pl.tex fix.)

Yes, please. This one is important indeed, as it does allow to produce
Polish documents on newer TeTeX.

Regards,
Sergey




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