Hi Bruno!
> Le 9 mai 2020 à 22:14, Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> a écrit :
>
> Hi Akim,
>
> (A) > I'm looking for means to avoid repetitions, and boilerplate.
>
> It needs to be balanced against the other characteristics of maintainability.
> Two important aspects are:
> (B) Making the code easy to understand.
> (C) Making it easy to find all definitions and all references of an
> identifier.
[...]
> Until the day I had to debug a complex invocation of a complex, hand-crafted,
> scarcely documented macro. I even had an IDE that showed me the result of the
> macro-expansion when I modified the input; nevertheless, since then, I tend
> to value (B) and (C) as more important than (A).
I fully subscribe to what you are reporting here. I have suffered from
equivalent symptoms in other languages, and also caused that suffering to
others myself.
Yet in the present case, I do not see it as clearcut as you do. I
wholeheartedly agree with the 'git grep' argument. That's why I had
last proposed
gl_SUBSTS([
GNULIB_ISWBLANK=0
GNULIB_ISWDIGIT=0
GNULIB_ISWXDIGIT=0
GNULIB_WCTYPE=0
GNULIB_ISWCTYPE=0
GNULIB_WCTRANS=0
GNULIB_TOWCTRANS=0
])
which does not, to my eyes, suffer from all the defects you see. I view
AC_SUBST as meta data, not as actual substitutions, and I don't see a problem
with factoring such meta data. I do like the clarity and regularity it
provides, including the case of very long identifier which are currently
treated on two lines, whereas most of them are one a single one.
Thanks for having taken the time to explain your point of view in details!
Cheers!
Akim
