Re: [PATCH] Possibility of using alternative separators in macros

[Maxim Nikulin]

On 16/05/2021 19:17, Bastien wrote:
> Juan Manuel Macías writes:
>
> > (On the other hand, maybe better than an alternate separator, some kind of
> > warning for unescaped commas might be more useful, as Maxim commented
> > here: https://orgmode.org/list/s7gfc6@ciao.gmane.io/)
>
> Yes, probably -- feel free to propose a patch for this.  Thanks!

Such warnings should be property of particular macros. Sometimes 
ignoring of arguments may be handy. So no patch is required. The trick 
could be documented somewhere, but I am unsure concerning proper place. 
Actually, I do not think, fatal error is user-friendly behavior. I am 
not aware if export already have convenient facilities to report 
warnings. Currently I do not feel I am ready to implement such feature 
if it does not exist yet.

However the point of that message was that extra commas may be made 
"transparent" for macros by introducing additional substitution, e.g. 
"$_" that expands into "rest" arguments. I consider "$@" or "$*" as 
worse variant since it rather mean "all arguments", so it is less 
flexible. For "eval" lisp macros, it is just replacing "_" by "$_" in 
argument list. Simple text macros require a bit more work but it is 
still comparable with documenting the feature.

We need a decision if "rest arguments" feature should be introduced. 
Once added, it will be harder to discard it due to compatibility issues.