Re: RFA: Support Windows extended error numbers in safe_strerror

[Jim Blandy <jimb at red-bean dot com>]

On 2/3/06, Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org> wrote:
> I'm sorry a lot of you find the changes either morally or aesthetically
> objectionable.  I'm not entirely sure which it is.

When I worked on Emacs from 1990, that was before the autoconf era,
and the code was covered with #ifdef blocks for various architectures
and operating systems.  I found them extremely irritating to work
with, since it took careful examination to figure out exactly what
invariants each branch of the #if expected from the surrounding code. 
It didn't help that I didn't usually have documentation handy for
whatever OS-specific bits that #if branch was trying to use.

So I find that kind of thing confusing, and it slows me down.  I don't
expect that everyone has my limitations, but I don't think they're so
rare, either.  A macro that takes documented arguments and is expected
not to randomly refer to stuff from its context is a big improvement
for me.