https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=47781
--- Comment #10 from Philip Prindeville <philipp_s...@redfish-solutions.com> --- On Aug 21, 2014, at 11:06 AM, joseph at codesourcery dot com <gcc-bugzi...@gcc.gnu.org> wrote: > https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=47781 > > --- Comment #9 from joseph at codesourcery dot com <joseph at codesourcery > dot com> --- > On Thu, 21 Aug 2014, philipp_s...@redfish-solutions.com wrote: > >> https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=47781 >> >> --- Comment #8 from Philip Prindeville <philipp_s...@redfish-solutions.com> >> --- >> (In reply to jos...@codesourcery.com from comment #4) >> >>> For the general issue, my inclination is that we should add plugin hooks >>> into the format checking machinery that allow plugins to define formats >>> with the full flexibility of all the format checking datastructures in >>> GCC. Using GCC plugins for this avoids problems with defining complicated >>> syntax in the source file to describe the peculiarities of different >>> formats, which might constrain future changes to the format checking >>> implementation by making too much of the internals visible to user source >>> code, because by design GCC plugins can use GCC internals which are free >>> to change incompatibly in ways that require plugin changes. >> >> What about using pragmas to describe the new format specifier? > > Those have the issue of either being limited in the sorts of formats that > can be described, or else exposing more internals than seems desirable to > expose as a stable interface. Plugins allow full flexibility (with > possible instability of interfaces), though a stable subset (e.g. formats > that take no length modifiers or flags) could probably be defined that has > a stable interface in source files (such as through attributes or pragmas) > that doesn't unduly constrain the internals of the implementation. But I > think any such stable interface would not be able to describe the full > generality of the existing built-in formats. > > One interesting question would be whether a good stable interface can be > defined that is general enough to describe GCC's internal formats - > whether those are regular enough that a description isn't tied to > hardcoded special cases or extremely complicated descriptions of what > cases should / should not get warnings. > Yeah, I agree: if the notation is adequate, all existing formats should be expressible using it.
