Re: ylwrap proposition

[Bob Proulx]

Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
> Ralf Wildenhues ha escrit:
> > Can s/yy/.../ change anything unintended?  E.g., do we need to ensure it
> > only changes words beginning with yy?
> 
> In theory it could, for example if the programmer used identifiers
> beginning with, or containing `yy'. However, I can hardly imagine
> someone who does that. At least, all yacc manuals declare that `yy'
> prefix is reserved for yacc/lex identifiers and explicitly discourage
> its use in application identifiers.

I believe that it is very well known and well propagated knowledge
that the strings yy and YY are often used to mutate the result into a
unique identifier.  Almost all practical documentation uses sed
substitution in the examples.  In fact this may be such a well known
technique that many users are probably relying upon this happening for
their own identifiers in addition to the ones from yacc/lex.  Adding a
lot of extra work to avoid this mutation may actually create problems
when expected transformations don't occur.  I am pretty sure that I
have code that falls into this area but would have to look.

Bob