>>>>> Akim Demaille writes:
> I'm sorry, but your argument makes no sense to me. I suppose it
> also means I should not use the pattern /* in sh because it might
> be a C comment? Or the converse?
The difference is that when I write "dnl some text" in an m4 file, it
is ignored as a comment no matter in which context I use it. (Arguably
you can shoot yourself in the foot with "dnl" when your doing highly
sophisticated m4 magic, but hardly anybody ever does that.) This is
not true for "# some text" -- that will break in a C language context.
That's why I prefer "dnl".
True, using "dnl", the comments won't make it into the generated
configure script, but my guess is that hardly any user ever really
looks into the shell scripts. As long as the comments are contained in
the m4 source, this seems to suffice.
I am more than happy to support _both_ forms, but I don't like the
idea of enforcing "#". If you guys say that this is the way autoconf
macros meant to be written and the internal macros use "#" over "dnl"
per convention, I will follow the guidelines -- no doubt. All I want
is to clarify my point that "dnl" is not evil per se and should be
supported in the macro archive.
-peter
