On 12/16/2016 08:45 AM, Joseph Myers wrote:
On Thu, 15 Dec 2016, 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.
There's a "GNU C Reference Manual" for the C language; I've no idea if
it's any good.
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/
It says "Although normally described in a C language manual, the GNU C
preprocessor has been thoroughly documented in The C Preprocessor, a
separate manual which covers preprocessing for C, C++, and Objective-C
programs, so it is not included here.".
So that manual might be a plausible place for documentation of the
preprocessor language as a whole (having excluded such documentation on
the basis of it being covered in the CPP manual), although since it's
strictly a reference that doesn't answer what to do with tutorial
content.
This document also looks very bit-rotten: "By default, GCC will compile
code as C89 plus GNU-specific extensions. [...]"
TBH, I have no interest in rewriting/maintaining C language manuals or
tutorials. :-( Given that there's resistance to removing the existing
CPP tutorial material entirely, I'll try to come up with some other plan
for leaving that part of the CPP manual as-is while addressing the
bit-rot in the options, etc, probably involving more/better use of
shared include files.