Re: removing empty parens after function names

[Paul Eggert]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

>     Do you know / can you imagine another convention that can be used
>     to denote a function or macro name as a symbol? Like we use <...>
>     for URLs or system header files, upper case to denote a variable in
>     plain text (in place of <var>...</var>), *...* for emphasis, etc.?

Sorry, I couldn't think of a simple short convention that would be
immediately obvious.  I'm not sure we need a single convention for all
these uses.

Single-quoting is common but in many cases I don't think we need to
bother with the quotes.  Conversely, in some cases, we may need to
append "function" to disambiguouate troublesome cases like iconv.
Here's an example:

    Do this here, before calling the real iconv_open, because the
    OSF/1 5.1 iconv function inserts a BOM, which is wrong.

This example could single-quote iconv_open and iconv but it's not
necessary here to avoid ambiguity.  (I prefer not to overquote when
the quoting is not necessary; of course your style may differ.)
Conversely, the word "function" here helps to distinguish the 'iconv'
function from the 'iconv' program.