On Fri, Feb 25, 2000 at 10:31:06AM +0100, Akim Demaille wrote:
: Hi Lars,
:
: | I've written a macro which makes it easier to write more flexible
: | autoconf-macros, and I thought some of you might find it interesting.
:
: It's interesting work which might be useful someday in Autoconf, but
: for now, I don't think we want to introduce ``complications''. In
: fact, we're trying to simplify the use of Autoconf, even if it means
: doing too much work.
I hear you.
: Yes, I have a few comments on your code which you might want to know.
Really appreciate it. I have only used m4 for a couple of days so it
figures my style and quoting might be a bit off.
: Why do you `indir' all the time? Oh!, yes, it's a dollar, not an `S'
: :) Well, for legibility, it might be better that you reserve your
: name space and use it:
I figured that using illegal macro-names and indir'ing everything could
help me avoid "accidental" macro-expansions and keep the sub-macros "local"
in a sense (as described in the m4 texinfo doc). Didn't work well with
AC_DEFUN though (automake can't handle macronames with special characters),
so I had to use define() instead for those.
Another thing I'm wondering about; I wasn't able to use m4's expr() in
autoconf without calling it through indir (but it works in plain m4) -
what's the reason for that? Has it been renamed to m4_expr() or something?
Lars J
