-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 [please don't top-post on technical lists] According to aaragon on 3/5/2009 9:08 AM: > 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. The m4 language is very specific - you can't put space between the macro name and the opening parenthesis, otherwise, you are invoking the macro without arguments and the parenthesis are output as literal text. If you want, you can submit a patch to the autoconf manual to make this even more apparent (I thought it might be in http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html#Autoconf-Language, but a quick read didn't make it obvious on macro calling convention). And unfortunately, since invoking macros with empty arguments often makes sense, it means that the m4 language itself provides no way to make nice error reporting for certain user errors. Using emacs does help, though, since the autoconf major mode makes it easy to match parenthesis. - -- Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well! Eric Blake ebb9@xxxxxxx -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkmwtBkACgkQ84KuGfSFAYBZvgCfUt095QrbvC4108vYO3c0GOVl Z5wAoMd+EhfhWw2O+Ifv8/bwIPKuZl94 =hzP3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
