Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[David Kastrup]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2015 11:46:30 +0000
>> From: Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden>
>> Cc: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>, address@hidden
>> 
>> > May I ask if there's a reason to not have a single style for const
>> > pointers? I get 2162 occurrences of "const char *", and 357 occurrences
>> > of "char const *" in the C sources.
>> 
>> Yes there is.  The two are semantically different.  In one of them, it is
>> the pointer which is declared constant.  In the other, it's what's
>> pointed at that's constant.  Though I can never remember which is which.
>> :-(
>
> Use 'cdecl':
>
>   cdecl> explain const char *p
>   declare p as pointer to const char
>   cdecl> explain char const *p
>   syntax error
>   cdecl> explain char * const p
>   declare p as const pointer to char

Neither C compilers nor C++ compilers nor C standards nor C++ standards
agree with that diagnosis.

-- 
David Kastrup