Re: [using gcc book] ch5.6 referring to a type with typeof

[Chris Devers <cdevers at pobox dot com>]

On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> The new declaration syntax never got designed, and no one currently
> has any intention of designing any such thing.  We are now a lot
> more cautious about accepting extensions to the C language than we
> were when this part of the manual was originally drafted.  So I
> would strike out all discussion of that.

Here, or everywhere?

I'm not familiar the details of with how GCC has evolved over the years,
but a lot of the book has these statements to the effect of "eventually
the plan is to..." or "sooner or later GCC will no longer...".

Short of a very thorough crash course in the current GCC status quo, I
can't know if such statements are currently valid.

Would it be prudent to seek out some or all examples of these future
looking statements & put them on the list for review? I'm thinking that
this would be a very large amount of material to examine.

> >     Names that start with underscores for the local variables are
> >     used to avoid conflicts with variable names occurring within
> >     the expressions that are substituted for 'a' and 'b'.
>
> Except this isn't strongly worded enough.  Suggested text:
>
>      Names that start with underscores are used for the local
>      variables, to reduce the risk of conflict with variable names
>      occurring within the expressions that are substituted for 'a'
>      and 'b'.  There is no way to eliminate this risk entirely, but
>      by sticking to a naming convention you can avoid it in practice.

The first sentence is a run-on though, and hard to follow.  (For that
matter, so was my version, now that I re-read it.)

    Names that start with underscores are used for the local
    variables. This reduces the risk of conflict with variable
    names occurring in the expressions substituted for 'a' and
    'b'. There is no way to eliminate this risk entirely, but
    it can be avoided in practice by sticking to such a naming
    convention.

Does it still gets the point across this way?



-- 
Chris Devers        cdevers@pobox.com
http://devers.homeip.net:8080/resume/

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