Re: [patch #5704] Data New/Open/Save

[John Darrington]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 04:22:14PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     > an alternative approach would be to implement a
     > special conversion specification within the
     > create_syntax_string_source function.  Then we could simply write
     > something like:
     >
     >  create_syntax_string_source ("EXPORT OUTFILE=%q.", de->file_name);
     >
     > This way, there's no need for the caller to worry about buffers or
     > dealloction at all.
     
     Yes, that's a good idea.
     
     However, I'd propose a slightly different syntax:
             create_syntax_string_source ("EXPORT OUTFILE=%sq.",
                                          de->file_name);
     If you make the full specification %sq, then you can still get
     GCC to check that a "char *" argument is present by telling it
     that it's a printf-like function.  There'd need to be a suffix
     character for unquoted strings too, e.g. %su, but all in all the
     slight inconvenience of using 2-character conversions is vastly
     outweighed (in my opinion) by having compile-time checking.
     
     > I remember coming across a sprintf like function  which allows you to
     > specify custom conversions, but I can't remember where I found it.
     
     There's a variety of them, and glibc even includes one of its
     own, but they're not hard to write yourself, especially if you
     don't need the full generality of printf (and I doubt we do).

OK.  So there's a number of issues to think about.

If you're agreeable, I'll commit this patch as is, and file a bug
about the quoting, so we can deal with it as a seperate issue.

J'

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