Re: m4sugar.m4

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Salut Akim!

Akim Demaille wrote:
>>>>"Gary" == Gary V Vaughan <address@hidden> writes:
>  > Would you mind if I ship an implementation of m4sugar.m4 with the
>  > next release of GNU m4, with an eye to replacing parts of it with
>  > C at some point?
> 
> There are some issues in m4sugar that were waiting for a better C
> implementation.  In particular:
> 
> - ERE instead of BRE

I'm still not sure how to do this in a backwards compatible way.
What about adding an optional 4th parameter for setting the regexp
syntax (that defaults to BRE if unset)?  Apps that need ERE can use:

    patsubst(foo, bar, baz, ERE)

> - text builtins should return their result *quoted*.

Agreed.  I'll make sure this goes in!

> However, a C implementation of m4sugar is not the best (=more urgent)
> service GNU M4 can give to M4sugar: call-stack introspection would be
> much better, and would considerably speed up Autoconf (I bet of 30%).
> Basically, everything related on m4_expansion_stack should be provided
> by m4 itself.

Okay, that sounds like a worthy goal.  I'll put it at the top of my
m4 TODO.

Cheers,
        Gary.
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan      ())_.  address@hidden,gnu.org}
Research Scientist   ( '/   http://tkd.kicks-ass.net
GNU Hacker           / )=   http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool
Technical Author   `(_~)_   http://sources.redhat.com/autobook

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