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 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 31 2001 - 21:00:13 EST