Standards Annotations

Rical Jasan ricaljasan@pacific.net
Fri Oct 21 07:38:00 GMT 2016


How do you envision the standards annotations in the descriptions?

Would we prefer something like the safety boilerplate at the top of
every description, immediately below the definition/name?  The way
they're typically written (when they're written) is more free-form, and
usually at the end of the description, and I've always imagined them
going there and keeping the same tone.

If we do boilerplate, though, we could make it look like the feature
test macros themselves; e.g.:

  void foo (int arg)          [Function]
  Preliminary: | MT-Safe | ...
  FTM: XOPEN2K8 || GNU

Otherwise, something like:

  void foo (int arg)          [Function]
  Preliminary: | MT-Safe | ...
  ...
  This function was a GNU extension until...

Or both.  The latter is obviously more tricky, but I like the written
word, and there is information there that isn't conveyed in the
boilerplate.  We could use the easy macro for the boilerplate and keep
the personal touch in the description, at the cost/risk of keeping the
two in sync.  Realistically, the (essentially) historical notes probably
won't change (often), so it probably doesn't add all that great of a
burden once they're there.

Keep in mind that headers and standards apply to many more types of
things than just functions, so they're not completely 1:1 with the
safety annotations wrt. the effect they'll have in the rendered output.

Thanks,
Rical



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