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

Alejandro Colomar
2022-12-03T21:04:08Z

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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 '$'?

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