man 3 switch

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Sun Nov 15 01:09:29 UTC 2009


On Sat, 2009-11-14 at 12:54 -0600, Frank Cox wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:15:22 -0430
> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> 
> > Moreover, IMHO documenting language keywords
> > via man pages as they are traditionally understood would be next to
> > useless. 
> 
> *blink*
> 
> "man switch" tells me all about the "TCL Built-In Command" called
> switch.
> 
> So the built-in TCL keyword is entitled to a man page but the C
> keyword is not?

In fact my view is that the TCL keyword (even if it's actually an
extension and not a language built-in) should *not* be documented via a
manpage, or at least not without requiring some special option to
"man" (e.g. man -tcl switch). I regard this (and similar Perl pages) as
an aberration. All it does is pollute the reference space for those (the
huge majority) who are not TCL or Perl programmers.

poc




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