Re: Forward Deceleration Changes

[Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>]

* Alejandro Colomar:

> Hi Mark and Mark,
>
> On Tue, Jun 03, 2025 at 03:52:59PM +0100, Mark Naughton wrote:
>> Agreed, Mark.
>> 
>> Mark
>> 
>> On Tue, Jun 3, 2025 at 3:48 PM Mark Harris <mark.hsj@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > > > When I open a man page I want to see "what arguments do I pass and in
>> > > > what order". With this change you have to parse the prototype for the
>> > > > semi-colon
>> > > > to see the start of the args.
>> > >
>> > > I tried to use a style that makes the ';' stand out more, by breaking
>> > > the line after it.  But I agree that the first times you look at it, it
>> > > can be a bit confusing and hard to distinguish.
>> >
>> > The main issue with the forward declaration syntax is that it is easy
>> > to mistake the forward declarations for arguments, especially when
>> > just quickly checking the man page to remind yourself which argument
>> > is first.  If you want to retain this syntax, what might help is to
>> > remove the bold font style from the forward declarations, or change
>> > their formatting in some other way to be different than that of the
>> > arguments.
>
> Hmmm, agreed.  I had been thinking about it.  Maybe using all roman for
> both the type and the variable name would be good.  Thanks!  I'll do it
> when I finish some other work I'm doing at the moment.

Somewhat related: This syntax is currently used for inputs that can be
either strings or arrays.  Two examples:

       size_t strnlen(size_t maxlen;
                      const char s[maxlen], size_t maxlen);

       int strncmp(size_t n;
                   const char s1[n], const char s2[n], size_t n);

Obviously, we want

     strncnmp(subject, "prefix", 6)

to be valid independently of the length of the subject string, and the
declaration with the array syntax does not seem to be compatible with
that.

Thanks,
Florian