Re: RFI: Trailing blanks

[Gary V . Vaughan]

On Saturday 18 August 2001 10:24 am, address@hidden wrote:
> Something like AC_MSG_RESULT(@""@) outputs @\"\"@, not @""@.  So the
> quadrigraph is not recognized, and not replaced.  I'm not in favor of
> also replacing @\"\"@, but just because it frightens me a bit.  If someone
> is convinced this is OK, then I'm OK.
>
> So we are looking for specially non special characters. @address@hidden

I think you are right to worry about escaped @\"\"@, since if you also 
replace that, Murphy's Law tells us to expect to find another layer where the 
whole thing is escaped again, or something.

But then, I wonder why you bother to `smash' anyway?  Recently I've taken to 
not using dnl for things like:

  AC_REQUIRE([AC_PROG_CC])dnl
 
Why is it there at all?  Just to save a blank line in configure.   
Obfuscating the source seems like a bad way to make the machine readable 
output prettier.   Who cares if the machine readable parts are ugly?  Well, 
obviously you and I do, and perhaps a few dozen others who read through it 
while we develop complicated code generation macros, but I don't think we 
should make the user interface for the thousands of casual users less 
friendly for the sake of ourselves.

I vote for dropping line smashing altogether.  If I'm irritated by huge 
blocks of whitespace when reading the generated code, I do like I do when cpp 
macros go awry:

     gcc -E -DHAVE_CONFIG -I. -I.. hello.c | sed 's/^[  ]*$//' | less -s

> Another possibility would be sort of autom4te pragma lines
>
> #smash: off
> some
>
>
> multiple
>
>
> empty lines
> #smash: on

Eeew!

I really think that leaving the blanks in is the right solution.

Cheers,
        Gary.
-- 
  ())_. Gary V. Vaughan     gary@(oranda.demon.co.uk|gnu.org)
  ( '/  Research Scientist  http://www.oranda.demon.co.uk       ,_())____
  / )=  GNU Hacker          http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool  \'      `&
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