Re: exist, configure, doc2tex and \index

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 11 August 2006 03:14 pm, you wrote:
> >> 1. In ./configure, shouldn't strings "(EXPERIMENTAL)" be removed now?
> >> Won't be "nice" for 4.2.
>
>    Enable command line macros (EXPERIMENTAL)
>    Enable placement of rectangles and other objects (EXPERIMENTAL)
>    Enable plot style image (EXPERIMENTAL)
>    Enable general binary data file reading (EXPERIMENTAL)
>    Enable X11 polygon info in binary, not ascii (EXPERIMENTAL)
>    Enable wxWidgets interactive terminal (EXPERIMENTAL)

Sorry, I misunderstood.  I thought you meant that "strings" should
no longer be experimental - and they aren't.

These remaining ones I really do consider to be experimental,
except maybe for the wxWidgets terminal.  I would not expect everyone
to choose to include them.  The wxWidgets terminal requires a large 
collection of very recent support libraries, and again many people may
not include it.

> If we keep both exists() and exist(), they should be mentioned in the docs
> (help exist, help exists)

To the user it is just like any other shorthand form. I would have written the
test     if (almost_equals(c_token, "exist$s"))
except that the parsing code doesn't use almost_equals().