the Linux man-pages as an educational tool (was: [PATCH v2] man/man3/mem*(): SYNOPSIS: Document non-standard mem*() functions as provided by <memory.h>)

["G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>]

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At 2026-08-02T01:36:28+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > Date: 2026-08-01 18:29:13-0500
> > From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> >
> > On 8/1/26 17:10, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > > #include's aren't that important.
> > 
> > But this whole thread is about #includes, no?
> > 
> > I would focus energy on areas of the manual where effort provides
> > the most bang for the buck. As your remark suggests, this particular
> > area is low priority.
> 
> I wouldn't call it low priority or low bang for the buck.  What I mean
> is that it's not a breaking change.
> 
> I believe education is important, and provides bang for the buck.
> It's not all about features.  The features are already there, but
> misused.

I'd like to underscore this point.  As I noted in my response to Doug,
the flagship book on C, as we all know, is stuck in 1988.  The throne is
vacant, with many pretenders, some with excellent cases for service as
regent.

But no head wears the crown.

And at the same time many C programmers are shy of consulting the formal
standard.  We can lament their lack of wisdom in doing so and in failing
to spin themselves up in standardese sufficiently to grapple with it.

But we can also throw 'em a bone.  To where shall they turn?

Sure, if they're in Emacs, they might go to glibc's Info manual.

But some people dislike Info, and some people use a different libc.

So what remains for the motley crew left behind?

The man pages.

I think people come to the Linux man-pages in part to learn C.  When I
was starting out, long ago, I wondered why there wasn't a man page for
the language itself.  Years later, I learned that there once sort of had
been, in the 1970s.  It was Ritchie's "C Reference Manual".[1]

But it wasn't on any Unix machine I had access to.

Why not?

Because Prentice-Hall didn't want it there.  And still don't, I guess.

https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cman

Maybe education is not a job the Linux man-pages project _should_ have,
but it is one that has been thrust upon it.

Regards,
Branden

[1] Not a man page, but you could render it intelligibly with nroff.

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