Re: silly question about editor

[John Calcote]

Alejandro,

Dig out the M4 manual and read the first chapter. M4 is much like the C 
preprocessor in many ways. In C, if you put a space between a macro name 
and the opening paren in the definition, the preprocessor won't 
recognize the macro as a function-like macro either. How do you handle 
this situation in your source code? I suggest that the answer is that 
you're more comfortable with the rules of the CPP than you are with 
those of M4. Once you increase your comfort level a bit with M4, you'll 
find that many of these types of problems just disappear.

Regards,
John

On 3/5/2009 9:08 AM, aaragon wrote:
> I guess what I mean is that if you put an space between the MACRO and the
> starting parenthesis, the macro fails and it's not like the error will point
> you to the line in the configure.ac file. Besides it's quite hard to keep
> track of all closing parenthesis and to get the quotation right. So there
> has to be a better way to deal with this than just using a plain text
> editor.
>
> aa
>
>
> Eric Blake wrote:
>    
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > According to aaragon on 3/4/2009 9:46 PM:
> >      
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > Maybe this is a silly question, but I found that the macros that I write
> > > in
> > > the configure.ac sometimes fail depending on the spaces and tabs that I
> > > use.
> > > Is there a way to automatically indent the macros? I tried using emacs
> > > but
> > > it didn't help.
> > >        
> > In what ways are you experiencing a failure?  Without an example of what
> > you typed, what you expected, and what you got, I'm not sure how to answer
> > you.  Autoconf includes an emacs mode to assist in writing autoconf
> > scripts, but it needs more care before it can perform consistent and
> > automatic indentation.
> >
> > - --
> > Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!
> >
> > Eric Blake             address@hidden
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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> > Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg
> > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
> >
> > iEYEARECAAYFAkmvy1IACgkQ84KuGfSFAYC4ogCgi6T1upLChwiRD49qQbUoZjKk
> > yRUAn1FLLNaQRh3etVgoAX4IP7q+ReKg
> > =x/Fi
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> >
> >
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> >      
>
>