expanding __attribute__((format,..))

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2006, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> I kind of liked this idea:
>     http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2005-07/msg00797.html
> but of course it was insane.

I still think a higher level state machine as described in the followups 
is how things should be done.

The first step (or the first hundred steps) would need to be a series of 
small incremental patches moving all the existing logic about format 
string structure from the code into more generic datastructures.

In so doing you need to consider how xgettext could be made to extract a 
superset of the possible diagnostic sentences so that i18n for the format 
checking messages can work properly again (which requires that full 
sentences be passed to xgettext and be known by the translators, while 
maintainability of the format descriptions requires that the information 
about valid combinations be maintained at a different level more like 
that used by the present datastructures).

Once the datastructures are suitably general, then interfaces to them can 
be considered.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com