Re: [ gnuplot-Patches-992149 ] String variables revisited

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Ethan A Merritt wrote:

> Anything you do _outside_ the quotes means that every single place
> that tests for a string constant has to be re-written to handle the
> possible substitution of other syntactic entities instead.

And everything you do inside them means you have to handle the
substitution at every single point of the code that actually uses a
string.  That's not necessarily a much smaller set of places.  It could
actually be a good deal larger.

It could almost certainly all be handled by extending m_quote_capture
to proceed evaluating a string-valued expression.

> Assume for the moment we use % for this purpose. Then the
> documentation would read:
> 	"<expression>"	evaluate immediately, with substitution
> 	'<expression>'		evaluate immediately, no substitution
> 	%<expression>%	evaluate later, with substitution at that time

I honestly don't see why we need the middle variant.  What is the
difference between evaluation and substitution that makes you want
control over each of them independently?

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (br...@ph...)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.