> On Apr 21, 2014, at 7:19 PM, Eric Blake <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 04/20/2014 04:36 PM, Daniel Goldman wrote: >> Hi, >> >> Any chance m4 could (or would want to) support named arguments? In other >> environments, I usually prefer named arguments over $n arguments. > > Interesting question. The master branch of m4.git (which is currently > highly experimental and nowhere near a release) agrees with you, and did > attempt to add named argument support. But we're a long way off from > ever making it actually useful enough to release; right now, the > development is focused on the stable branch-1.4 branch.
For the record, the syntax I briefly implemented simply involved defining a macro with a parameter list, and then referring to parameters by name in the body of the macro: m4_define(`exch (parm1, parm2)', `$parm2 $parm1') exch(`foo', `bar') bar foo It's still something I'd like to have one day, but I'm not sure I like that syntax... Cheers, -- Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)
