Re: comma separated lists

[Roger Leigh]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.

However, you can easily use m4_translit to convert the spaces to
commas, so spaces can have the same advantages as commas.

> 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:

True.

When passing multiple arguments into a single m4 macro argument,
commas only make things more confusing (is this a list, or a set of
separate arguments?).  What the macro actually does with the list is
not relevant (it could use them as arguments to another macro, or as a
list), but the interface to the user of the macro is.


-- 
Roger Leigh

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