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Re: function portability documentation


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: Re: function portability documentation
Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 13:02:36 -0700
User-agent: Gnus/5.1008 (Gnus v5.10.8) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux)

Thanks for that suggestion and the work in generating that nice patch.

One general comment is that there is a lot of duplicate text that
perhaps could simply be replaced by an index.  E.g., instead of this:

   @item btowc
   On Windows systems, @code{wchar_t} is a 16-bit type and therefore cannot
   accomodate all Unicode characters.
   ...
   @item fgetwc
   @itemx fgetws
   On Windows systems, @code{wchar_t} is a 16-bit type and therefore cannot
   accomodate all Unicode characters.
   ...
   @item fputwc
   @itemx fputws
   On Windows systems, @code{wchar_t} is a 16-bit type and therefore cannot
   accomodate all Unicode characters.
   ...
   @item fwide
   On Windows systems, @code{wchar_t} is a 16-bit type and therefore cannot
   accomodate all Unicode characters.
   ...

(and on and on -- there are lots of these), it would be better to
simply have a paragraph like this:

   On Windows systems, @code{wchar_t} is a 16-bit type and therefore cannot
   accomodate all Unicode characters.  This affects the following functions:

      btowc fgetwc fputwc fputws fwide ...

and then create an index of all the functions that have portability
implications, and plant entries for btowc etc. in this index.  Or
perhaps we could reuse one of the existing Autoconf indices for this
purpose.

Using an index would make the main text shorter and much easier to
read, and the index would let people look up info about each function
as needed.




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