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Subject: Re: [kbuild-devel] Re: CML1 cleanup patch
In-Reply-To: <20010326013228.A11181@thyrsus.com> from "Eric S. Raymond" at "Mar
 26, 2001 01:32:28 am"
To: esr@thyrsus.com
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 06:57:48 -0500 (EST)
CC: Peter Samuelson <peter@cadcamlab.org>,
        "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, kbuild-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
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From: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>
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esr scripsit:

> I could have done this, allowing tokens to be recognized as numeric only
> if all chars are digits.  I didn't, for two reasons: (1) Lexical analysis
> is, as it turns out, a hotspot in the CML2 compiler code -- the last thing
> it needs is more overhead, and (2) interpreting symbols with leading digits
> as nonnumeric tokens is just *wrong*.  Ugh.  Violates the Principle of Least
> Surprise big-time.

In fact this has come up before: in Usenet software, which has to differentiate
between an article and a sub-newsgroup.  An article has to have an all-numeric
name, and It Would Have Been Nice if all newsgroup names began with non-digits,
but then there was comp.bugs.4bsd.

-- 
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
	--Douglas Hofstadter
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