comes up with a formal spec of macros that defines a regular grammar,
with all the corners (like quoting and whitespace/newline handling)
figured out as part of that. How to do that without breaking existing
manuals that are heavy users of macros, I don't know.
The only clean future I can envision is a new command, not changing the
existing (broken-by-design) @macro.
However, I have yet to see (or be able to devise) any design that can be
cleanly implemented in TeX. There is a fundamental problem because so
much of Texinfo (not just @macro) is line-oriented. Recognizing and
manipulating "\n" characters in C or Perl or whatever is no problem.
That is not even close to true in TeX. Preprocessing sources with
makeinfo -E is not a robust solution either.
The current manual describes some of the edge cases and workarounds, FWIW.
k
