FAQ list (was: Re: Using Macros)

[Steve Summit]

In article <14404 at diamond.BBN.COM> mlandau at bbn.com (Matthew Landau) writes:
>Seems like this should be on the FAQ list, since it comes up every 
>couple of months.

In article <151 at smds.UUCP> rh at smds.UUCP (Richard Harter) writes:
>Shouldn't this be in
>the "most frequently asked questions" posting?

and several other people have suggested the same thing.

As a matter of fact, I had considered putting the do{...}while(0)
trick in the list, then left it out because I didn't remember it
being asked all that often.  The "Frequently Asked Questions"
list is at risk of turning into a "Fascinating Questions" list,
which would obviously make it even longer than it already is.
Its original charter was to answer the questions that got asked
every month (or every week!), not to answer every question anyone
could ever ask.  I'm not really interested in turning it into a C
textbook.  (But if there are any publishers out there... :-) )

Nevertheless, I'll probably put do{...}while(0) in a future update.

Ideally, besides the full, monthly posting and the "abridged"
list, there would be a much longer list, available upon request,
which had no compunctions about answering merely fascinating
questions and no pretenses about being short.  Ray Chen has set
up a similar scheme on comp.sys.ibm.pc.whatever.it's.called.lately,
with a mailserver to automatically dispense the longer, unposted
reference stuff.  I've not done that yet because mail in and out
of adam is simply too unreliable at present: half the stuff I
send out bounces, and I'm sure at least that percentage of the
stuff you guys try to send me does so as well.

If any of you archive site administrators would like to give me a
public-ftp-access directory for keeping the FAQ lists and related
stuff in, I'd be quite interested.  (Among other things it would
be nice to make available, the nroff source for the current list
contains a bunch of troff codes which are invisible in the posted
version but which can make it look much nicer when printed.)

                                            Steve Summit
                                            scs at adam.mit.edu