From: bc@freeuk.com   
      
   On 28/10/2025 12:56, Michael S wrote:   
   > 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.   
      
      
   I don't understand. What's hard about interactive programs?   
      
   The problem below, which is in standard C and runs on both Windows and   
   Linux, should give you all the interativity needed for a program like CDECL.   
      
   It reads a line of input, and prints something based on that. In between   
   would go all the non-interactive processing that it needs to do (parse   
   the line and so on).   
      
   So what's missing that could render this task impossible?   
      
   (Obviously, it will need a keyboard and display!)   
      
   ----------------------------------------   
   #include    
   #include    
      
   int main() {   
        char buffer[1000];   
      
        puts("Type q to quit:");   
      
        while (1) {   
            printf("Cdecl> ");   
            fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), stdin);   
            if (buffer[0] ==  'q') break;   
      
            printf("Input was: %s\n", buffer);   
        }   
   }   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)