.macro behavior

[Ian Lance Taylor]

"Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@novell.com> writes:

> Is it intentional that .macro
> 
> - ignores the (configurable) set of symbol name characters and instead
> only allows [[:alpha:]_$][[:alnum:]_$]*
> - silently inserts a zero-length named macro if the name starts with
> any non-token character
> - silently ignores the rest of the line if a formal argument starts
> with any non-token character
> 
> If not, I'd like to fix this. One major concern here is that with these
> restrictions one can't build trivial things like a .bss
> pseudo-directive...

None of these behaviours are intentional.

But you're still not going to be able to define a macro which starts
with '.'.  Those are handled specially in read_a_source_file().
Although I suppose that could also be changed.

Ian