On Fri, 10 Nov 2006, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
I kind of liked this idea:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2005-07/msg00797.html
but of course it was insane.
I still think a higher level state machine as described in the followups
is how things should be done.
wouldn't that be killing a mosquito with a bomb? :) (unless of course we
can find a simple description language)
The first step (or the first hundred steps) would need to be a series of
small incremental patches moving all the existing logic about format
string structure from the code into more generic datastructures.
In so doing you need to consider how xgettext could be made to extract a
superset of the possible diagnostic sentences so that i18n for the format
checking messages can work properly again (which requires that full
sentences be passed to xgettext and be known by the translators, while
maintainability of the format descriptions requires that the information
about valid combinations be maintained at a different level more like
that used by the present datastructures).
Once the datastructures are suitably general, then interfaces to them can
be considered.
Can I do anything to help? I mean, can you point me the files and what
should I do in order to make this move forward? (the most I've made was a
few little patches to make a customized cross-compiler to a mips robot, so
I'm not very familiarized with the code...)
Regards,
Nuno
