Last update: 02 June,2000
2000 #006 _____________________________________________________________________________ Topic: m4 Relevant Sections: Spec: XCU5 Resolution Request: ------------------- The m4 man page only talks about recognition of octal and decimal numbers and output of numeric values in any specific radix in the description of the eval macro. In all other cases, all implementations I have seen parse numeric input and produce numeric output using base 10. This should be addressed explicitly by the specification. Resolution Response ------------------- A future revision should make this explicit as follows: Add the following to the end of the 1st paragraph at the top of XCU5 P475 (on XCU6 draft 3 P614, L23360 ) Except for the first argument to the eval built-in macro, all numeric built-in macro arguments shall be interpreted as decimal values. The string values produced as the defining text of the decr, divnum, incr, index, len, and sysval built-in macros shall be in the form of a decimal-constant as defined in the C-language. Rationale ------------- This problem was identifed during the review of XCU6. This explicit change matches existing implementations Circulated for review: 2 Jun 2000 Proposed resolution: 2 Jun 2000