Re: backslashes, macros, indexes, texinfo

[David Kastrup]

Karl Berry <address@hidden> writes:

> 6) I recognize that you want me to just omit the \catcode`\\=0.  That
> may solve your problem, but it creates problems for other people doing
> other things with @macro.  For instance, you're invoking the macro with
> a whole-line argument; macros taking braced arguments have a different
> set of problems in this area.

Why would one do _any_ backslash processing on whole-line arguments?

> So either way there are incompatibilities between the various
> implementations, just different sets of incompatibilities.  And what
> texinfo.tex is doing now is what matches the documentation, as it
> stands.

I don't see where the documentation states that macro arguments need to
get requoted at every call level.

And I'm pretty sure that the current texinfo.tex behavior does _not_
match the HTML creation we use (which is why we needed to change
texinfo.tex in the first place).

> It's theoretically conceivable to change the TeX behavior (and
> documentation) to be closer to makeinfo, but it would remain
> inevitably imperfect, and be fraught with potential problems
> (\futurelet, catcodes, etc.).  Therefore I don't want to expend the
> time and effort if any simpler solution will suffice.

Well, the simple solution is that we continue to add our texinfo.tex
changes.  It's a bit of a nuisance but required to keep HTML working the
same as both Info and PDF, and while I cannot vouch for our HTML
production, our Info production definitely uses the standard Makeinfo.

So I suspect that TeX may currently be the only backend that actually
tries, however imperfectly, matching the documentation, thus diverging
from the other backends.

-- 
David Kastrup