8.1.1 Active Characters

To fully understand where proper quotation is important, you first need to know what the special characters are in Autoconf: `#' introduces a comment inside which no macro expansion is performed, `,' separates arguments, `[' and `]' are the quotes themselves, and finally `(' and `)' (which M4 tries to match by pairs).

In order to understand the delicate case of macro calls, we first have to present some obvious failures. Below they are "obvious-ified", but when you find them in real life, they are usually in disguise.

Comments, introduced by a hash and running up to the newline, are opaque tokens to the top level: active characters are turned off, and there is no macro expansion:

# define([def], ine) =># define([def], ine)

Each time there can be a macro expansion, there is a quotation expansion, i.e., one level of quotes is stripped:

int tab[10]; =>int tab10; [int tab[10];] =>int tab[10];

Without this in mind, the reader will try hopelessly to use her macro array:

define([array], [int tab[10];]) array =>int tab10; [array] =>array

How can you correctly output the intended results(2)?