Paul M. Cardon: > + A newline character is ignored when it is preceded by a > backslash character. This permits you to break up long > lines so that they are easier to edit. > > + Blank lines or lines that begin with a `#' character > are ignored. This permits you to insert comments and > whitespace so that the tables are easier to read. > > If you make the assumption that the rules are applied as listed in the man > page then the observed behavior of line continuation processing occuring > prior to comment stripping matches the documentation. I'm glad to see confirmed that the documentation actually matches the program's behavior. Why then the griping? It seems to me that people have preconceptions about how software works, and fail to pick up the signals in the documentation that are in conflict with their preconceptions. For me, this is not just a simple documentation problem. Changing people's preconceptions is beyond my abilities. However, calling this a bug in the beholder's eye was not appropriate. I can deal with this case of misreading just like I dealt with misreading in the past, that is, by adding more redundancy to the documentation. I can deal with this case of misconfiguration just like I dealt with misconfiguration in the past, that is, by adding a warning for backslash-newline-hash. Wietse
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 14:41:24 PDT