Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [kbuild-devel] Re: CML1 cleanup patch | Date | Mon, 26 Mar 2001 06:57:48 -0500 (EST) | From | John Cowan <> |
| |
esr scripsit:
> I could have done this, allowing tokens to be recognized as numeric only > if all chars are digits. I didn't, for two reasons: (1) Lexical analysis > is, as it turns out, a hotspot in the CML2 compiler code -- the last thing > it needs is more overhead, and (2) interpreting symbols with leading digits > as nonnumeric tokens is just *wrong*. Ugh. Violates the Principle of Least > Surprise big-time.
In fact this has come up before: in Usenet software, which has to differentiate between an article and a sub-newsgroup. An article has to have an all-numeric name, and It Would Have Been Nice if all newsgroup names began with non-digits, but then there was comp.bugs.4bsd.
-- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore --Douglas Hofstadter - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |