Re: 13-m4-undivert-culprit.patch

[Gary V. Vaughan]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 04:13:45PM +0200, Akim Demaille wrote:
> >>>>> "Gary" == Gary V Vaughan <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> >> And the 1-ary -> n-ary as a simple for-loop extension is the most
> >> attractive of these, IMHO, extremely useless extensions.  Beware of
> >> the dark side.
> 
> Gary> It took me a while to absorb this.  But, having dwelt on it for
> Gary> a while, I agree with you.
> 
> BTW, any reason that if we have undivert(FILE) we don't have
> divert(FILE)?  (Not that I find that this overload of undivert was
> intelligent BTW, I would much prefer another set of macro for
> undivert(UNEXPANDED BY ACCIDENT) will complain MACRO does not exist,
> while divert(UNEXPANDED BY ACCIDENT) will just populate with junk
> files instead of complain `not a number').
> 
> There is already so little type checking, corrupting this even more
> would be bad.
> 
> I'm in favor of deprecating this `````feature''''''.  divert/undivert
> take numbers, period.

Since we are on a simplification trip, I'm inclined to agree.
Presumably autoconf doesn't (ab)use this feature, and vendor m4's
don't support it.  If so, lets clean this up too!

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  \'      `&
`(_~)_  Tech' Author        http://sources.redhat.com/autobook   =`---d__/