Re: [groff] hyphenation issues

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Keith Marshall <address@hidden> wrote:
 |On 05/05/18 10:48, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
 |> (Incidentally, I share your preference for putting type qualifiers
 |> [as opposed to storage classes] _after_ the type name itself.  It
 |> makes complex declarations easier to understand.)
 |
 |Personally, I consider that to be a poor choice ... especially if you
 |are making it on purely stylistic grounds; conventionally:
 |
 |  const int foo;
 |
 |is more common than:
 |
 |  int const foo;
 |
 |but that's not the real issue.  In practice, the placement of "const"
 |qualifiers is *not* arbitrary; far from "making the declaration easier
 |to understand", it can effect a subtle change in meaning.  For example,
 |in C code, it is very common to see:
 |
 |  const char *foo;
 |
 |which means something very different from:
 |
 |  char const *foo;
 |
 |Your stylistic preference might encourage the latter idiom, but it
 |likely isn't what you meant.  (The former declares a mutable pointer to
 |an immutable C-string; the latter is an immutable pointer to a mutable
 |C-string).

It does not?  I finally ended up using this latter style because
it mirrors the spoken language: it is "a pointer to constant
character(s)".  I think Stroustrup used this in his book
accompanying C++ ~98, and Brian Kernighan also refers to spoken
language in the video that was linked in the other thread.
And then it is also more consistent, consider

  char const * const *

which would need to be "const char const * *" in the "standard"
notation, but _that_ would be something different, then.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)