Re: comma separated lists

[Bruno Haible]

Peter Eisentraut writes:
> The advantage of comma-separated lists are that they can be processed
> naturally as lists in m4, whereas the whitespace-separated lists are just
> passed through as a blob of data, usually to shell loop.

This advantage that you mention is not visible to the user. (I don't
care about one or two percent of speed in autoconf execution.) Whereas
the second disadvantage of comma-separated lists is that it doesn't
support computing the list at configure time:

funcs="malloc, free, foobar"
AC_CHECK_DECLS([$funcs])

funcs="getenv foobar"
AC_CHECK_DECLS([$funcs])

Doesn't work!

> Eventually, all macros will use the comma style.

Hopefully not.

Bruno