On 16 December 2016 at 06:46, Sandra Loosemore wrote: > Looking at the structure of the whole manual, though, I see that most of it > is in fact a tutorial on how to use the preprocessor language, like you > would find in a C programming book. Is this a useful thing for us to be > providing? Offhand I am not sure how up-to-date this material is or how > much of a maintenance burden it is, but it seems peculiar to be providing > such extensive introductory material on the preprocessor when we don't do > that for the C or C++ languages; we assume that people already know how to > program. > > I'm wondering if it would be better to toss the tutorial and merge the > remaining useful/non-duplicate information about the preprocessor into the > main GCC manual. I think the key things to cover are: > > * Any GNU extensions to the preprocessor language > * Predefined macros > * Any pragmas not already documented in the GCC manual > * Any command-line options not already documented in the GCC manual > * Any implementation-defined behavior or implementation limits not > already documented in the GCC manual
Makes sense to me. The tutorial parts could always be moved to the wiki (the place where documentation goes to die ;-) if they're worth having at all. > On a related topic.... do we really need to retain implementations of > -traditional-cpp and the documented "obsolete features" (assertions)? It > seems especially weird to retain support for -traditional-cpp given that > support for pre-ANSI C was removed from the compiler proper at least a dozen > years ago. As Janne said, I think that's to support uses of the preprocessor that are separate from the compiler, i.e. not for C or C++ code.
