On 16/12/16 11:55, Jonathan Wakely wrote: > 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.
I have found the CPP manual to be a useful reference on occasion - I don't know of any better online pre-processor reference, and like many people in these "paperless" times I don't have a decent C reference book on hand. I would agree that it makes sense to move the gcc specific stuff over to the main gcc manual. But please keep the CPP manual around - the wiki would be fine. If you remove the bits that might change, such as pragmas, gcc-specific predefined macros, etc., then it is unlikely that it will need any maintenance in the future. > > >> 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. >
