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SubjectRe: [kbuild-devel] Re: CML1 cleanup patch
Date
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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
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