[mailed and posted]
On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Can I make a suggestion ? Allow !( ... ) constructs, or some such, in
> lists.
I haven't looked at the configure parsing code, but my intuition[1] is
that this what change something that can be done with a finite state
parser to something requiring a context-free parser. While such a
construct would be useful, I think that it massively complicates the
parsing of the configure file.
I do think that for some purposes, it might be useful to generate
configure files with perl (or even m4 ;-). While I never did that, I did
have similar configuration files on multiple machines to manage and was
always going to do that sort of thing anyway. Just another project I
never got around to.
-j
Notes:
[1] My actual training, if in anything, is in theoretical linguistics.
So my intuitions on these matters is not entirely untrained intuition.
--
Jeffrey Goldberg
I have recently moved, see
http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/contact.html
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice
