Bruno Haible <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Peter Eisentraut writes:
> > The advantage of comma-separated lists are that they can be processed
> > naturally as lists in m4, whereas the whitespace-separated lists are just
> > passed through as a blob of data, usually to shell loop.
However, you can easily use m4_translit to convert the spaces to
commas, so spaces can have the same advantages as commas.
> This advantage that you mention is not visible to the user. (I don't
> care about one or two percent of speed in autoconf execution.) Whereas
> the second disadvantage of comma-separated lists is that it doesn't
> support computing the list at configure time:
True.
When passing multiple arguments into a single m4 macro argument,
commas only make things more confusing (is this a list, or a set of
separate arguments?). What the macro actually does with the list is
not relevant (it could use them as arguments to another macro, or as a
list), but the interface to the user of the macro is.
--
Roger Leigh
Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/
GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 available on public keyservers
