Re: What to do about changeword?

[François Pinard]

address@hidden

> On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 09:36:05PM +0100, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:

> > Can you think of an (useful) application of the changeword machinery
> > that could justify the order of magnitude slowdown in the parser?  As
> > Rene's comments point out, changesyntax can achieve most of the useful
> > parts of changeword's functionality without the overhead.

> > I vote for ripping it out to clean up the source, and remove the
> > tempatation for people to use it! :-)

> I agree.  I think Franc,ois is the guy to whom we should ask for the final
> word.

Shouldn't we ask René?!  I was happy to keep his baby in my hands while he was
completing is doctoral research, and was proud giving the baby back to him,
strong and still alive :-), when he returned.

René also asked me questions about `changeword', and if I remember correctly,
we discussed the matter with the original submitter of this patch, who is
identified in the ChangeLog, and addressed in the THANKS file.

I would not swear it, this was long ago, but I vaguely think there was a
consensus that we could abandon `changelog'.  The simplest would be to check
both with René and the contributor.  And of course, leave a bit of time
to the forum of `m4' users to react, if any feel like commenting about this.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard