Re: Help etags parse lisp.j

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2016 10:40:20 -0700
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >   . in a large enough project, the user doesn't have an easy way of
> >     knowing whether she needs K&R support
> 
> Yes they do. Any current project won't bother with K&R. The handful of older 
> projects that still have K&R and haven't bothered to rip it out (e.g., glibc is 
> *still* ripping it out) should have a toolsmith that knows ancient history. 
> Really, K&R support should be turned off by default.

I don't want to turn it off, sorry.  Etags is part of the set of tools
that are invaluable when you are assigned with a task of making some
change in a large project that lay dormant for years -- they allow you
to quickly find your way in unfamiliar code.  It should support old
code styles.

> >  . implementing such an option is not trivial, to say the least, given
> >    the complex state machines used by parsing of C-like languages
> 
> Nontrivial yes, but still it's not terribly hard.
> 
> In the short term, perhaps we could work around the problem by replacing this:
> 
> extern int make_ctrl_char (int) ATTRIBUTE_CONST;
> 
> with this:
> 
> extern ATTRIBUTE_CONST int make_ctrl_char (int);
> 
> and similarly for the other affected declarations.

Let me first see if I can find a better solution.

Thanks.