Re: strange character "\f" found in source

[Patrick McCarty]

On 2009-08-21, Mark Polesky wrote:
> Patrick McCarty wrote:
> 
> > With my bash shell, you can type
> > 
> >   git grep "^L" scm/*
> > 
> > where ^L is typed as "C-V C-L".
> > 
> > And I get these hits:
> > 
> >   scm/define-markup-commands.scm:^L
> >   scm/define-markup-commands.scm:^L
> >   scm/define-markup-commands.scm:^L
> >   scm/define-markup-commands.scm:^L
> 
> Okay, I grepped the whole source code and it turned up:
> * a bunch of binaries (I'll ignore these obviously)
> * COPYING (5 hits)
> * scm/define-markup-commands.scm (4 hits)
> * elisp/emacsclient.patch (1 hit)
> 
> I looked at the last one but I can't be sure that
> the form feed is out of place. I'm going to remove
> the 9 other hits, should I remove the emacsclient
> one too, while I'm at it?

Personally, I would not remove any of them.

- The ones in COPYING are important in that they define where the page
  breaks (form feeds) are.

- The ones in define-markup-commands.scm are used to delimit new
  sections.

- The one in emacsclient.patch is part of the patch (obviously) for
  emacs/emacsclient.  So if you removed the formfeed, the patch might
  not apply cleanly.

I think using formfeeds in source code is fine.  And some projects use
them liberally: Guile's source contains hundreds if not thousands of
formfeed characters, for example.


-Patrick