Re: [PATCH] Re: .macro behavior

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich at novell dot com>]

>And I still think there's greater benefit from keeping the
>syntax of macro *parameter names* the same as today, something
>like "[A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9_]+" and not dependent on the target
>symbol character set.  (Heh, saying :alpha: and :alnum: would
>imply it's locale-dependent.  I don't think we want *that*! ;-)

One additional note here: The current behavior is to allow
"[A-Za-z_$][A-Za-z0-9_$]+", which already is in conflict with some
targets' use of '$' (see those defining LEX_DOLLAR).
I would consider it acceptable to shrink the set down to
"[A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9_]+" as you suggest (in order to be largest commonly
acceptable set in general. However, since macros can be used to define
macros, having a way to avoid 'common' symbol names may be quite
valuable, and having available as option here only underscores (to add a
prefix and/or suffix) may make things rather difficult. I'd therefore
like to not restrict targets that allow a reasonable set of additional
symbol characters from actually using them here.

Still, I'm hoping to get comments on this from others, namely Ian, who
originally agreed that the current behavior doesn't seem to be
intended.

Jan