Re: strings and macros

[Juergen W. <wie...@fr...>]

Johannes Zellner wrote:
> 1. A limitation to 80 characters for sprintf really hurts!

Full ACK.  

> 2. dynamical macros would be really nice ;-)
>
>     set macros
>     pl(x) = sprintf("plot '<extract -n %s' u 2, '<extract -n -f %s' u 3",\
>                     x, x)
>     @pl("myfile.dat")

The hardest part in your suggestion would be to construct the
function call.  OTOH, parsing a constant expression is already
implemented.  Thus the hardest part would be to terminate the
expression correctly.

How about:
gnuplot> set macros {expressions}
gnuplot> pl(x) = ...
gnuplot> @@pl("myfile.dat")@@

The "@@" syntax would have the additional advantages of backwards
compatibility and that you could use a general expression, not only
single functions.

...

A few minutes later:
Arrgh!  At the time string_expand() is called, the input line has not
yet been tokenized.

Is there any possibility to tokenize and parse a string not on the
input line?


Juergen