Re: Major revision of CPP manual - draft available for comment

["Zack Weinberg" <zackw at Stanford dot EDU>]

On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 05:09:24AM +0100, Neil Booth wrote:
> Hi Zack,

Ah, you're back!  How was your trip?

> Some things I noticed:
> 
> 1.1.2: You mention horizontal whitespace is discarded at the end of a
> line.  I found this a little confusing, but I can see where you're
> coming from, once I'd read 1.1.4.  However, it's not entirely right,
> either.  When you mention it again in 1.4, you say it throws away
> space at the end of each line of a multi-line string literal - this is
> not true (I think).  It throws away the space only if it forms a
> backslash-space-newline sequence, which is the general rule I think
> you should be referring to.

It seems I misremembered the outcome of the long discussion over
trailing whitespace.  You're right, trailing whitespace is preserved
at the end of each line of a multi-line string literal.  That's easier
to explain, anyway.

> 1.1.4: "There is no way to escape the closing quote or angle bracket."
> You might want to refer, as an aside, to your "Computed includes"
> section, where you do provide an indirect way to do this.

Not in general, only if you can live with having a literal backslash
right before the quote mark.  And I'm pretty sure this trick won't
work for angle bracket includes.  I should probably just put in a
cross-reference labelled "(except for this dark corner over here)".

> 2.7: "[some of ]those triggered by '-pedantic' and -'Wtraditional'".
> Otherwise, I can see people expecting all such warnings to be
> eliminated, which is not the case.

Good point, will adjust.

Do you have any suggestions on what to do with the macro section?
It's the bulk of the text and I find myself avoiding it entirely.

zw