Re: set macro inconsistency

[Ethan A M. <sf...@us...>]

On Tuesday, February 21, 2012 11:17:07 pm pl...@pi... wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just defined a few macros to shorten some lengthy plot commands, eg.
> 
> in_lt_blue=' linecol rgb "light-blue" '
> 
> It worked fine when I loaded the complete file using load command. No 
> errors and I got the right results.
> 
> Then I tested something else directly at the command prompt:
> 
> gnuplot> in_red=' linecol rgb "red" '
> gnuplot> @in_red
>                    ^
>           invalid character @
> 
> 
> I realised that this was in fact correct since I had not ' set macros'
> 
> But in that case why did it work when I loaded this and similar lines 
> with load ?
> 
> It seems that there is an inconsistency here. The load command should 
> equally have to parse the macros since there was no set macro command in 
> the script.
> 
> So there is an apparent bug: load command somehow circumvents the check 
> on the state of set macros and expands them anyway.

You are correct.  
The string_expand_macros() routine is called in two places.  
One is inside a test for if (expand_macros) {}, but the one used by the 
load command is not.  I do not recall if this was intentional
or simply an oversight.   

It would be a one-line change to misc.c, but let me think about possible
side effects.