Re: Commit: Add support for a temporary input line pointer in gas/read.c

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Alan,

>> I could do this, but why ?  What do we gain.  It is not like these functions
>> need to be fast, or that they affect the performance of the assembler.
> 
> We gain:
> a) Less global state.  In this case, possibly doesn't affect things
>    like https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2015-06/msg00010.html, but
>    global state without good reason ought to be avoided.  Yes, you
>    can tell me that next time I add some. :)
> b) Reentrancy.  Do we save input_line_pointer and set it to a string
>    somewhere then do the same again in some function called?  Only
>    matters of course if you want to write a bit of generally useful
>    infrastructure that might be used is other places.
> c) Local state means asserts and setting saved_ilp NULL after use is
>    hardly necessary.

Fair enough.  I'll put this as a back-burner project for now.  Or maybe a
Google Summer of Code opportunity ?

Cheers
  Nick