Gavin Smith <[email protected]> writes: > On 2 June 2015 at 10:12, David Kastrup <[email protected]> wrote: > >> 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. > > One more email on this. (Sorry if it's getting boring.)
I haven't yet been able to find the time for processing your previous input so it hasn't had yet a chance to get boring. > One point that may have been missed is that it appears that in > makeinfo 4.13, there was a difference depending on whether the > argument was in braces or not. [...] > As you can see the backslash remains doubled when no braces were used. > > The changes to texinfo.tex were made following this report: > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2010-06/msg00003.html, > where the macro was being used with braces. The macro was @dvar in > > @defmac m4_split (@var{string}, @dvar{regexp, [\t ]+}) > > Until the change, a doubled up backslash resulted in a doubled up > backslash, unlike the single backslash produced by makeinfo. > (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2010-06/msg00007.html) > > But then later there was a report about a case where braces were *not* > being used: > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2011-08/msg00002.html. > Called like > > @funindex \relative > @funindex relative > > That report agrees with the test I just did that "\\" is kept as-is by > makeinfo > 4.13. (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2011-08/msg00002.html.) > > So it appears that texinfo.tex was changed to match the behaviour of > makeinfo in one case, but in doing so a mismatch with another case was > introduced. > > I think it would be easy to turn off the backslash interpretation for > whole-line arguments to macros, given without being enclosed in > braces. I can try to propose something if people think is a good idea? It seems like a reasonable idea to quote { } inside of braces in order to allow for unmatched braces. If one quotes those, one needs to quote \ for obvious reasons. I would guess that this had been the original motivation for the quoting business. Distinguishing those two cases in the described manner should cover the LilyPond use case I think. We don't use braces on the indexing macros in question. -- David Kastrup
