[tz] bringing tzcode in the ANSI era

[Christos Zoulas]

On Oct 26,  9:55am, eggert at cs.ucla.edu (Paul Eggert) wrote:
-- Subject: Re: [tz] bringing tzcode in the ANSI era

| The mental aid for aging humans is more important, and is an
| issue that I'm sympathetic to, as I'm aging myself.  To be
| honest I find that 'register' hurts my understanding of the
| code a bit more than it helps.  Its cost is noise that slows
| me down when I'm trying to figure out what the code actually
| does; its benefit is that it tells me that the address of a
| local is never taken.  To my eyes the cost is small but the
| benefit is even smaller: I can easily determine myself
| whether the address is taken on the rare occasions when I
| need or want to know that.

I am sorry, but I find the register keyword abuse to forbid taking
the address of a variable of questionable use. At the very least
if the consensus is to keep it the way it is now, then we should
add it to all the variables in the code we are not taking the
address of, otherwise its use is inconsistent. I would prefer that
time is spent in more useful endeavors such as:

	- fixing the library to not core-dump internally eg:
		asctime(localtime(timep))
	- set errno to useful values on failure, and document it
	- add reentrant functions and locking for the non-reentrant ones
	- move the man pages to -mdoc instead of -man so we can
	  generate HTML etc from them
	- make the git repository available
	- make the tar files create a directory like everything
	  else these days

Many of those changes are in NetBSD.

christos