Re: [PATCH] Various pages: SYNOPSIS: Use VLA syntax in function parameters

Andrew Pinski
2022-12-03T21:14:16Z

On Sat, Dec 3, 2022 at 1:05 PM Alejandro Colomar via Gcc
<gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> I'll probably have to release again before the Debian freeze of Bookworm.
> That's something I didn't want to do, but there's some important bug that
> affects downstream projects (translation pages), and I need to release. It's a
> bit weird that the bug has been reported now, because it has always been there
> (it's not a regression), but still, I want to address it before the next Debian.
>
> And I don't want to start with stable releases, so I won't be releasing
> man-pages-6.01.1. That means that all changes that I have in the project that I
> didn't plan to release until 2024 will be released in a few weeks, notably
> including the VLA syntax.
>
> This means that while this syntax is still an invent, not something real that
> can be used, I need to be careful about the future if I plan to make it public
> so soon.
>
> Since we've seen that using a '.' prefix seems to be problematic because of
> lookahead, and recently Michael Matz proposed using a different punctuator (he
> proposed '@') for differentiating parameters from struct members, I think going
> in that direction may be a good idea.
>
> How about '$'?

$ is a GNU extension for identifiers already.
See https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-12.2.0/gcc/Dollar-Signs.html#Dollar-Signs

Thanks,
Andrew

>
> It's been used for function parameters since... forever? in sh(1). And it's
> being added to the source character set in C23, so it seems to be a good choice.
> It should also be intuitive what it means.
>
> What do you think about it? I'm not asking for your opinion about adding it to
> GCC, but rather for replacing the current '.' in the man-pages before I release
> later this month. Do you think I should apply that change?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alex
>
>
> --
> <http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>