17.8 Solution for fatal_error

The fatal_error macro (see section Exiting from m4) is not robust to versions of GNU M4 earlier than 1.4.8, where invoking __file__ (see section Printing current location) inside m4wrap would result in an empty string, and __line__ resulted in ‘0’ even though all files start at line 1. Furthermore, versions earlier than 1.4.6 did not support the __program__ macro. If you want fatal_error to work across the entire 1.4.x release series, a better implementation would be:

define(`fatal_error',
  `errprint(ifdef(`__program__', `__program__', ``m4'')'dnl
`:ifelse(__line__, `0', `',
    `__file__:__line__:')` fatal error: $*
')m4exit(`1')')
⇒
m4wrap(`divnum(`demo of internal message')
fatal_error(`inside wrapped text')')
⇒
^D
error-->m4:stdin:6: Warning: excess arguments to builtin `divnum' ignored
⇒0
error-->m4:stdin:6: fatal error: inside wrapped text