Tools for manipulating message catalogs

Peter da Silva peter at ficc.ferranti.com
Tue Apr 16 04:08:50 AEST 1991


In article <1991Apr12.122701.9545 at dg-rtp.dg.com> eliot at dg-rtp.dg.com writes:
> Why is this any easier? Symbolic names are an advantage when you want to be
> able to change the underlying value later on. I claim that with message
> numbers, you shouldn't change those values! These numbers should be CONSTANTS!

Like these constants?

	#define PI 3.141592653589 /* values from memory... apologies if */
	#define E 2.171828182845 /* they're incorrect */
	...

It's pointless making them symbolics, because they're not going to change.
Quick, what's the numeric value for ENOMEM? SIGPWR? TIOCSETC?

Symbolic names are an advantage to the person writing and debugging the
program, because they reduce the number of meaningless magic numbers they
need to track.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  `-_-'  peter at ferranti.com
+1 713 274 5180.  'U`  "Have you hugged your wolf today?"



More information about the Comp.unix.programmer mailing list