Re: What to do about changeword?

[Gary V. Vaughan]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 05:35:09PM -0400, François Pinard wrote:
> address@hidden
> 
> > On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 09:36:05PM +0100, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
> 
> > > Can you think of an (useful) application of the changeword machinery
> > > that could justify the order of magnitude slowdown in the parser?  As
> > > Rene's comments point out, changesyntax can achieve most of the useful
> > > parts of changeword's functionality without the overhead.
> 
> > > I vote for ripping it out to clean up the source, and remove the
> > > tempatation for people to use it! :-)
> 
> > I agree.  I think Franc,ois is the guy to whom we should ask for the final
> > word.
> 
> Shouldn't we ask Ren?!

Of course!  René is subscribed to m4-forum, which is in turn
subscribed to m4-discuss...  I'm Cc:ing Pete too, though his details
are 7 (seven!) years old...

> I was happy to keep his baby in my hands while he was
> completing is doctoral research, and was proud giving the baby back to him,
> strong and still alive :-), when he returned.

I hope to do the same.  With luck 1.5 will happen in the coming weeks
too.

> I would not swear it, this was long ago, but I vaguely think there was a
> consensus that we could abandon `changelog'.  The simplest would be to check
> both with Ren and the contributor.  And of course, leave a bit of time
> to the forum of `m4' users to react, if any feel like commenting about this.

Looking through the files in the distribution, it does seem apparent
that changeword is deprecated in favour of changesyntax, and as such
I'd really like to remove it to reduce clutter in the code.

Cheers,
        Gary.
-- 
  ())_. Gary V. Vaughan     gary@(oranda.demon.co.uk|gnu.org)
  ( '/  Research Scientist  http://www.oranda.demon.co.uk       ,_())____
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