Hi Tom, At 2023-02-18T18:31:25+0000, Tom Schwindl wrote: > > Do you expect C programmers to be more likely to copy and paste from > > the man page source document or from the rendered page (probably in > > a terminal window, but possibly from a PDF)? > > > > I expect them to copy & paste from the rendered page but I thought > writing out "'" is a bit cumbersome so I refer to it as \[aq]. Ahh, that can be a bit confusing without clear context. :D > My "worry" with this was that new programmers could potentially > execute a command like the following: > > $ cc -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=1993'09L test.c > > and wonder what they did wrong. I see--that is a good point. But I don't know that there is much the man pages can do about that issue, apart from having a better intro(1) page. The scenario you imagine is an unfortunate consequence of the grouping character WG14 selected. New C programmers on *nix are going to have to develop some sophistication with the POSIX shell language as well, and that will be even more the case now--a cost of letting the Swiss win battles... Mainly because Alex is reading, I will point out that Ada did this, and several other aspects of numeric literals, right--40 years ago. >> Numeric literals are all introduced by an initial digit. A >> requirement that has long been recognized when printing numeric >> tables is for a character to break up long sequences of digits: in >> Ada, the underline character serves this purpose. In contrast to >> identifiers, underlines in numeric literals do not alter the meaning, >> so that 12_000 naturally has the same value as 12000. >> >> A simple sequence of digits is an integer literal written in decimal >> notation. For other bases from 2 up to 16, the base is given first >> and is followed by a sequence of digits enclosed by sharp characters >> (#) or by colons (:), the colon being used as replacement character >> for the sharp, but only when the sharp is not available. The enclosed >> digits may include the letters A to F for bases greater than ten. >> Thus, the conventional ways of expressing bit patterns in binary, >> octal, or hexadecimal are provided. >> >> Real literals must contain a period, which represents the radix >> point. They may be expressed in decimal notation or with other bases. >> Finally, both integer and real literals may include the letter E >> followed by an exponent. http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83rat/html/ratl-02-01.html#2.1 But C programmers have long indulged in the sport of ignoring every lesson any other programming language had to teach, whether through careful design or blundering mistake.[1] C'est la vie. > But thinking about it a bit longer, copy & pasting from the rendered > manpage might be the bigger issue. This prospect was a major factor in my efforts to get groff's own man pages much more fastidious in this respect, and to promulgate the usage of appropriate special characters in man page sources, an initiative that I'm not sure has yet taken flight, although Linux man-pages is rapidly improving in this regard. The real test is whether such careful practice percolates elsewhere, where disinterest in (or outright resentment of) writing documentation, in man(7), mdoc(7), or any other form, is rampant. Regards, Branden [1] Thompson discarded type checking and "//" comments from BCPL; the latter came back relatively painlessly (though only in C99, which Ritchie refused to endorse). The former has been resurrected in fitful stages, and only where the suffering imposed by careless typing can be discerned as imposing engineering costs in defect resolution greater than in initial implementation by a factor of 1,000 or more. https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
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