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From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.perl,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Tools for manipulating message catalogs
Message-ID: <2-QAT-C@xds13.ferranti.com>
Date: 15 Apr 91 18:08:50 GMT
References: <1991Apr7.190119.24825@motcad.portal.com> <1991Apr8.191035.13836@alphalpha.com> <1991Apr10.122642.3991@dg-rtp.dg.com> <1991Apr11.084924.1951@alphalpha.com> <1991Apr12.122701.9545@dg-rtp.dg.com>
Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva)
Organization: Xenix Support, FICC
Lines: 20

In article <1991Apr12.122701.9545@dg-rtp.dg.com> eliot@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@ferranti.com
+1 713 274 5180.  'U`  "Have you hugged your wolf today?"