Follow-up Comment #11, bug #66438 (group groff):
[comment #10 comment #10:]
>> To quote the brackets the shell command needs to see.
>
> Thank you for clearing that up to me! I did not think about the m4 context,
> _and_ I did not think of `[`and `]` being m4's quote characters.
They're not its defaults; it provides a mechanism to change the quotes, and
Autoconf exercises it.
> Yes, [1] (logical) page 102, section "7.3.5 Bracket Expression", Item 6.
> lists them as BREs.
I don't see them in Issue 4's BREs, so I guess they got added later.
My rule of thumb is that _groff_ stuff needs to be Issue 4-portable. (You
might have seen me bewail the continued survival of Solaris 10 on the mailing
list.)
> I see that now. Would be very unreadable, probably. I find m4's choice of
> quotation syntax... surprising? Unusual? I don't know, anyway, I have deep
> respect, so do not want to judge here.
m4's default quotes are ` and ', which you might imagine would also be a
headache to deal with when produce Bourne shell code--and possibly a worse
one.
In my opinion an excellent way to get started with m4 is to read the brief
whitepaper introducing it. I'm attaching a copy.
(file #56627)
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