From: already5chosen@yahoo.com   
      
   On Sun, 26 Oct 2025 15:45:34 -0700   
   Keith Thompson  wrote:   
      
   > Michael S  writes:   
   > > On Sun, 26 Oct 2025 14:56:56 -0700   
   > > Keith Thompson  wrote:   
   > >> Michael S  writes:   
   > >> > On Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:20:45 -0700   
   > >> > Keith Thompson  wrote:   
   > >> [...]   
   > >> >> Free software still has to be usable.  cdecl is usable for most   
   > >> >> of us.   
   > >> >>   
   > >> >> [...]   
   > >> >>   
   > >> >   
   > >> > I'd say that it is not sufficiently usable for most of us to   
   > >> > actually use it.   
   > >>   
   > >> Why do you say that?   
   > >   
   > > I would guess that less than 1 per cent of C programmers ever used   
   > > it and less than 5% of those who used it once continued to use it   
   > > regularly.   
   > > All numbers pulled out of thin air...   
   >   
   > So it's about usefulness, not usability.  You're not saying that   
   > it works incorrectly or that it's difficult to use (which would be   
   > usability issues), but that the job it performs is not useful for   
   > most C programmers.   
   >   
   > (One data point: I use it occasionally.)   
   >   
      
   Few minutes ago I typed 'pacman -S cdecl' at my msys2 command prompt.   
   Then I hit Y at suggestion to proceed with installation. After another   
   second or three I got it installed. Then tried it and even managed to   
   get couple of declarations properly explained.   
   So, now I also belong to less than 1 per cent :-)   
      
   In the process I finally understand why the build process is none-trivial.   
   It's mostly because of interactivity.   
   It's very hard to build decent interactive program in portable subset   
   of C. Or, may be, even impossible rather than hard.   
   Personally, I consider interactivity of cdecl as UI mistake.   
   For me, as a user, it's a minor mistake, because I can easily ignore   
   interactivity and to use it as a normal command line utility:   
   $ cdecl -e "FILE* uu"   
   declare uu as pointer to FILE   
      
   But if I were tasked with porting of cdecl to non-unixy environment   
   then interactivity would be the biggest obstacle.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)