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Re: patch to avoid huge buffer in scan-skel.l
From: |
Akim Demaille |
Subject: |
Re: patch to avoid huge buffer in scan-skel.l |
Date: |
Sun, 02 Feb 2003 10:39:39 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.090008 (Oort Gnus v0.08) Emacs/21.2 (i386-pc-linux-gnu) |
>> From: Akim Demaille <address@hidden>
>> Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2003 17:32:41 +0100
>> The people I know who tried Guile had me convinced it is still too soon.
Paul> Which version of Guile did they try, and what problems did they
Paul> run into? (I'm not a Guile user myself, but I keep meaning to
Paul> give it a try....)
I don't know. It was a bit more than one year ago.
Paul> Please don't get me wrong: I like M4. I'm just worried that it might
Paul> not be the best tool for this job, as the job evolves.
I believe that the main difference bw Guile and M4 today is that one
has a maintainer :(
>> I'm referring to everything that makes the syntax more pleasant (e.g.,
>> named arguments), much faster (e.g., a non macro syntax for shifts),
>> and an easy means to escape some characters (i.e., the "hard quotes"
>> as he says).
Paul> These are all nice things to have, particularly the last one;
Paul> but at this point we are heading down the path of designing a
Paul> language (since M5 is not what we want, either), and that
Paul> sounds like a major investment.
I think there are many things we can have bit per bit. Hard quotes
are nice, indeed, but quadrigraphs, thought quite a pain in the neck,
make it less urgent. I'm especially impatient of getting the shifting
$@ stuff, as I'm quite convinced a lot of time is burned in m4_map:
currently it's n^2 :(
A simple Bison/Autoconf/M4sugar C module would already simplify a lot
a of things, and improve the speed. m4_map and m4_quotearg are
scheduled to be the earliest additions...