On Thu, Jun 07, 2012 at 12:29:03AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
On 06/07/2012 12:19 AM, John Darrington wrote:
> Surely using a symbol instead of a literal constant makes maintenance
easier not
> harder?
I don't see why. For example:
remove ("a/b");
is simpler and easier to maintain than:
#if DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR == '/'
#define DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR_STRING "/"
#elif DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR == '\\'
#define DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR_STRING "\\"
#else
#error "Unknown DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR" DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR
#endif
remove ("a" DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR_STRING "b");One reason is that one could easily find all the places where constructed paths are used in Gnulib using grep. Another reason is that it would be trivial to add support for some future operating system that decides to use a different character (neither / nor \) as the directory separator. A third reason: "a/b" looks to me like a mathematical expression, whereas "a" DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR_STRING "b" is explicit and unambiguous. Anyway, if you really have an aversion to this patch I won't force it upon you until I have some hard evidence that it is causing a tangible problem. (It would make our job easier however, if these "probably not the cause of the problem but who knows" issues were fixed upstream.) Regards, J' -- PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285 A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3 See http://keys.gnupg.net or any PGP keyserver for public key.
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