Re: question about linker

On 30/11/2024 01:28, Keith Thompson wrote:

Bart <bc@freeuk.com> writes:

Perhaps you can post a trivial bit of C code which reads in C source
code and shows the first lines of all the function definitions, not
prototypes nor function pointers. It can assume that each starts at
the beginning of a line.

 No.  It's straightforward for an experienced C programmer looking at
code that's not deliberately obscure.  A program that can do the same
thing reliably would have to include a C preprocessor and parser.
 It's obvious that :
     int foo(int);
is intended to be a function declaration,

By itself? Sure. Within a large very busy source file, it'll get lost in the noise. Where is the start of each function? I don't want to analyse each line!
A week ago somebody on reddit posted a link to a C project. The source code was unusual: it was 'clean' for a start, but also each function started with:
  func ....
Presumably that was some empty macro; I don't recall.
But an amazing thing happened: if viewed within my editor, I could navigate between functions with PageUp and PageDown keys. That's never happened before with C. (Note this is /my/ crude text-mode editor.)
Normally, to do that, I'd have to use a visualisation tool to turn C code into my syntax, then it becomes instantly clear. (Unfortunately I can't compile it; that would need a lot more work.)

I acknowledged elsewhere that I forgot about declarations of static
functions.  (Hundreds of function definitions in a single source file
seem unlikely.)
 

I'm working with a single-file Lua implementation. It has 880 function definitions. My SQL test file has 2100 functions.