Hi Alex, At 2026-02-21T20:56:05+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > On 2026-02-21T11:41:42-0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > At 2026-02-21T16:02:52+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > > > +.SH RETURN VALUE > > > +.IR s+strlen(s) . > > > > Too cute, in my opinion. Use English. :) > > The thing is, at first I thought, am I going to repeat the same exact > words as in the DESCRIPTION? > > DESCRIPTION > strnul() returns a pointer to the terminating null byte in the > string s. > > RETURN VALUE > strnul() returns a pointer to the terminating null byte in the > string s. > > I could remove the DESCRIPTION altogether... What would you do?
Fair. In this case, I'd probably just say... See \[lq]DESCRIPTION\[rq] above. I don't have much sympathy for hackers who complain that the "RETURN VALUE" section didn't tell them what they needed to know when the one-sentence "DESCRIPTION" _that they didn't read_ would have. At a certain point, documentation writers have no defense from people who refuse to read. > I might as well write it as &s[strlen(s)] if pointer arithmetic is the > confusing part. :) Hah! > > I assume that the string library reforms you're pursuing are > > intended in part to be adopted by newcomers to C. > > I intend old programmers to use it too. Goooooood luck. As we've seen, to take gets(3) away from some people has required killing it off from the standard C library itself. Some old programmers get really good. Some just get old. > I guess you're expecting a patch to groff once this is in a branch of > gnulib you're using. ;) No, not expecting. :) Replacing our bespoke `strsave()` with `strdup()` seems like a higher priority to me. https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?66518 Regards, Branden
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