Re: serious flaw of @c

[Karl Berry]

    This demonstrates that address@hidden' is not the same as `%' in TeX :-(

Of course not.  They aren't even remotely similar.  I don't know any way
to make a comment character in texinfo.tex, i.e., a way to say
\let\foo=%.  Do you?  There are no characters available to make be
catcode 14, as far as I've ever been able to think of.

    A fix would require that 

These changes seem to amount to rewriting the majority of texinfo.tex.
That's not going to happen, at least not by me.  Sorry.

A huge amount of work has gone into newline handling already.  I rather
suspect that any change will make it worse.

    Besides being a very ugly (undocumented) deficiency, a working
    solution is quite important for the address@hidden' trick within macros (if
    expanded with `texi2dvi -E').

Sorry, I have no solution.  You probably know more about Texinfo macros
than I do by now.  Lilypond and/or groff are continually stretching
Texinfo to its utter limits and I think you have just surpassed them.

Forgetting about the current @macro stupidity, can you think of a
different design for macros altogether that would be alleviate these
issues?  I have not been able to think of any good way to deal with the
different way newlines are used.

Sorry.

karl