Re: [PATCH 1/4] system_data_types.7: Add '__int128'

[Alejandro Colomar <colomar.6.4.3@gmail.com>]

Hi Paul,

On 2020-10-02 19:52, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Why describe __int128_t in these man pages at all? __int128_t is not a 
> property of either the kernel or of glibc, so it's out of scope.

Well, as I see it, [unsigned] __int128 is as good as [u]int64_t.
They are part of the C interface in Linux.
As a programmer I never cared if it was
Glibc providing me the type with a typedef,
or GCC providing me the type with its magic.

If you propose not to document the stdint types either,
I can see your position, but I'll disagree.



A few personal lines:

I just want to use it, and to do that,
I need a reference manual where to look for how to use it.
And belive me that unsigned __int128 has been very useful to me.

I think having this page with most of the types,
in a centralized manner, is exactly
what I would have needed in the past.
I have had trouble finding where ssize_t was defined.
I could have looked at the POSIX manual,
and I would have easily found that it is defined in <sys/types.h>,
but I didn't even know that it was a POSIX thing
(and I can tell that I'm not the only one who didn't know this :),
so I didn't even know where to search for it.

When I wanted to use unsigned __128, kind of the same thing,
where do you search for the documentation of something
that you don't even know who specified it?

When that happens, the first thing for me is to 'man something'.
If that doesn't give me any useful info, then duckduckgo something.

In the internet there's much info,
but also much of it is incomplete or incorrect,
so if I have the man, I trust the man over anything else
(except for the standard documents, of course).

But the standards documents usually provide the information
in a reverse fashion:
If you know where to look at, you'll find it.
But if you only know its name, it'll be hard to find where it is.

The man provides documentation with the name of what you want to
know about.  Simple and easy.

And man is faster than the internet :)


Regards,

Alex.