Hi Brian and наб! On 1/28/23 21:40, Brian Inglis wrote:
Hi folks,Seeing the recent tv_nsec patches drop the standard locale digit grouping characters "," from the member range [0-999,999,999] made me regret the loss of the punctuation which provides better and quicker comprehension of long strings of digits.
Nice! Didn't remember about that separator. It makes a lot of sense to use it in comments and the likes in the pages. Maybe we should be a bit more cautious in source code examples, but definitely for big numbers outside of running code should have them.
наб, would you please update your patches with that? I also have a few comments that I'll write in a moment in answers to your patches.
Cheers, Alex
It may be time to consider using the locale independent C23 digit separator characters "'" wherever more than a handful of digits occur, possibly convert grouping character uses in existing man pages as they are changed, and specify a future standard policy approach to provide better and quicker comprehension of long strings of digits: perhaps using a new digit separator register and glyph escape sequence \*ds \*[ds] \[ds] \(ds if not in use by base groff?
The sequence for the unslanted single quote is \(aq.We could add somewhere in man-pages(7) that decimal numbers should use a separator every 3 digits, and hex and binary should use it every 4 digits.
As well as the recently modified pages: clock_getres.2 timer_settime.2 timerfd_create.2 utimensat.2 there appear to be obvious occurrences in only the following pages: futex.2 read.2 sendfile.2 write.2 mallopt.3 keyrings.7 mq_overview.7 sched.7 time_namespaces.7but there appear to be about 400 pages with more than 6 decimal digit strings (some spurious glibc hex commits and address outputs) where it could perhaps help, such as in POSIX version dates e.g. 2001'12L, and undoubtedly more with long digit strings in other radixes.
Would you mind preparing a patch for all of those? If you'll do it, better wait until we merge наб's patches, to avoid conflicts.
Cheers, Alex
-- <http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
Attachment:
OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
