Richard Stallman Announces GNU C Language Reference Manual

[coder]

Can I show my age and ask: wtf is a Texi file?

Texinfo. It's FSF's adaptation of the TeX typesetting language for making hyperlinked reference manuals. You can think of it as their attempt to supersede man pages. Its primary client was meant to be the info browser, but I think its traction was mostly limited to Emacs users.

These days, the most popular way to view Texinfo docs is via HTML. If you've ever viewed the HTML docs for tools like grep or gcc, you've been looking at docs authored in Texinfo.

Separately, some industry players (Sun, and I forget who else) created a XML-based successor to the legacy manpage formats, based on XML Docbook. It's more structured and semantically rich than Texinfo, but I say that having never written or edited a single line of a .texi file (though I did write more than enough L^AT_EX).

Also if you want to set a reference manual in 2022, is it really pertinent to use formats that probably haven't seen any light since the 1980s?

Well, it's a text-based markup language. Those work a lot better in source control systems than binary files edited in WYSIWYG editors.

[coder]

Not being a C programmer myself, I have to ask: is a GNU C manual a good thing? On one hand, I believe ANSI C should be everybody's target.

Fortunately, recent ISO C revisions have picked up a lot of the GNU extensions. I looked at this when the kernel moved to C11, and the practical implications were pretty small because the kernel doesn't use the C library and most of the differences between C89 and C11 they were already getting via C89 + GNU extensions.

I tend to agree with you, though. If I'm writing C, I would wrap any GNU-specific extensions in macros that I can redefine for other compilers. In C++, I tend to use strict ISO compliance.

[Displacer]

Can someone post a compiled pdf somewhere?

https://www.docdroid.net/73uNJco/c-pdf

[ClosedSource]

https://www.docdroid.net/73uNJco/c-pdf

Thank you.

[Chewi]

If you hadn't said who'd written this, I'd have guessed.

Good choices include Lisp, Scheme…

[cb88]

Can I show my age and ask: wtf is a Texi file?

Also if you want to set a reference manual in 2022, is it really pertinent to use formats that probably haven't seen any light since the 1980s?

Not so much your age as ignorance and lack of ability to search before speaking. Texinfo files (and perhaps more commonly LaTeX) are just source files you use to generate final typeset output... they are still in common use for producing technical and research papers.

[kpedersen]

If you hadn't said who'd written this, I'd have guessed.

Heh. I bet it did pain him slightly to have to tag Java on the end

[Displacer]

Thank you.

There were some compilation warnings (about cross references and some more) so I am not sure this compilation is 100% correct (table of contents is absent for example).

[M@GOid]

Every time I hear someone mentioning the C language. I remember of this scene from the Golden Boy anime (barely safe for work):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKMR02o1I88

[coder]

There were some compilation warnings (about cross references and some more) so I am not sure this compilation is 100% correct (table of contents is absent for example).

LOL. There's always some "badness" when you're processing TeX files!


This is more a comment about TeX than Texinfo, but for all the praise people seem to heap on TeX, there are formatting errors I've seen in papers and even a couple printed books that only seem to happen with TeX. It'll be like one stray line that juts out into the margin or something. Very rare, but very noticeable when it happens. Even less common, sometimes the vertical alignment will be way off, with one line overlapping another.

Another thing I find funny about LaTeX is that the cross-references in any doc of a substantial length never totally converged. This would lead to references containing wrong page numbers, for instance. Perhaps that's why many books seem to avoid explicit page number references altogether. Anyway, I set my LaTeX build script to stop, if the doc still hadn't converged after 5 iterations.