Re: Do we really need a CPP manual?

[Jonathan Wakely <jwakely dot gcc at gmail dot com>]

On 16 December 2016 at 06:46, Sandra Loosemore wrote:
> Looking at the structure of the whole manual, though, I see that most of it
> is in fact a tutorial on how to use the preprocessor language, like you
> would find in a C programming book.  Is this a useful thing for us to be
> providing?  Offhand I am not sure how up-to-date this material is or how
> much of a maintenance burden it is, but it seems peculiar to be providing
> such extensive introductory material on the preprocessor when we don't do
> that for the C or C++ languages; we assume that people already know how to
> program.
>
> I'm wondering if it would be better to toss the tutorial and merge the
> remaining useful/non-duplicate information about the preprocessor into the
> main GCC manual.  I think the key things to cover are:
>
> * Any GNU extensions to the preprocessor language
> * Predefined macros
> * Any pragmas not already documented in the GCC manual
> * Any command-line options not already documented in the GCC manual
> * Any implementation-defined behavior or implementation limits not
>   already documented in the GCC manual

Makes sense to me.

The tutorial parts could always be moved to the wiki (the place where
documentation goes to die ;-) if they're worth having at all.


> On a related topic....  do we really need to retain implementations of
> -traditional-cpp and the documented "obsolete features" (assertions)? It
> seems especially weird to retain support for -traditional-cpp given that
> support for pre-ANSI C was removed from the compiler proper at least a dozen
> years ago.

As Janne said, I think that's to support uses of the preprocessor that
are separate from the compiler, i.e. not for C or C++ code.