Hello Paul, On 5/12/21 11:17 PM, Paul Eggert wrote: > On 5/12/21 1:43 PM, Alejandro Colomar via Libc-alpha wrote: > >> +If any of the arguments is of a floating-point type, > > "any" -> "either" Okay. I thought that either meant XOR, but now I learnt it may also be OR. > >> +these macros shouldn't be used > > That's too strong. It's often OK to use MAX and MIN on floating point > arguments. Yup, I changed it a few minutes later. > >> +The arguments may be evaluated more than once, >> +and their types might be promoted to a common type >> +if both arguments aren't of the same type. > > This is muddy. It should state clearly that even if A and B are both > integers, MAX (a, b) might not return their maximum. For example, on a > typical C platform today, MAX (-1, 2147483648) returns 4294967295 and > MIN (-1, 2147483648) returns 2147483648. Hmm, yes, I'll add a BUGS section for this. Usual arithmetic conversions and why you should avoid them :) > > Also, the man page shouldn't require the arguments to be evaluated at > least once. It's possible to implement MAX so that it sometimes doesn't > evaluate one argument, and the documentation shouldn't preclude such an > implementation. In which case they might not be evaluated at all? I'm curious. Maybe if one of the arguments is literal NAN and the implementation raises an exception for it? > > The man page should more specifically mention that although MIN and MAX > are defined <sys/param.h> on GNU platforms, other platforms define them > elsewhere or not at all. Okay. > >> +These macros return the value of one of their arguments, > > Unfortunately they don't necessarily do that, as shown in the MAX > example above. Fixed. > > I suggest looking at the remarks about MAX and MIN that are made here, > and incorporating the useful parts of these remarks into the man page: > > https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/lib/minmax.h > Okay. Thank you very much! Cheers, Alex -- Alejandro Colomar Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/
