Re: patch to avoid huge buffer in scan-skel.l

[Akim Demaille]

 >> If you find some spare time, spend it reading the documentation of
 >> M5: there are a few simple ideas in there that we just need to steal
 >> and implement in GNU M4 to suddenly vastly simplify, improve and
 >> immensely speed up all our M4 based tools.

 Paul> I briefly scanned it, but I don't see the ideas.  Sorry.

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).

 >> The last significant effort will be making M4 be a library.

 Paul> That will be a lot of work, though.  

I don't think so: Gary already made significant surgery on M4.  

 Paul> Wouldn't it be better to use an already-existing library
 Paul> instead?  Something like Guile, say?

I'm not excited at this idea.

 Paul> I originally didn't think that Guile was nearly as good a match as M4
 Paul> for this problem, but now that I've seen what the M4 solution looks
 Paul> like I'm not so sure.  Autogen uses Guile for this sort of thing, and
 Paul> it seems to work fairly well.  <http://autogen.sourceforge.net/>

The people I know who tried Guile had me convinced it is still too soon.