linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 1/1] alpha: trivial: remove ^L chars

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Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.2601061656070.45251@angie.orcam.me.uk>
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2026 17:17:48 +0000 (GMT)
From: "Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro@...am.me.uk>
To: Magnus Lindholm <linmag7@...il.com>
cc: Askar Safin <safinaskar@...il.com>, 
    Richard Henderson <richard.henderson@...aro.org>, 
    Matt Turner <mattst88@...il.com>, linux-alpha@...r.kernel.org, 
    kernel-janitors@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, 
    patches@...ts.linux.dev
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/1] alpha: trivial: remove ^L chars

On Tue, 6 Jan 2026, Magnus Lindholm wrote:

> >  As a matter of interest, why would the presence of ^L characters cause
> > any issues?  That is just another instance of white space and it has been
> > commonly used across some source code to separate functional parts, e.g.
> > in the GNU toolchain.  It can be ignored unless you actually send the code
> > to a printer (which I suppose hardly anyone does nowadays).
> 
> I guess you're right, at this point it's mostly aesthetics. ^L is just
> whitespace and the compiler ignores it, likely a relic from the old
> days. Some editors display it a bit oddly, and most of the kernel seems
> to have pruned these over time, but a few still linger in arch/alpha,
> which fits the age and heritage there.

 FWIW, ^L is printed just as ^L here (VIM), but I can imagine a GUI text 
editor might show "--- page break ---" or suchlike in a graphical form 
instead.  If it does cause odd behaviour in an editor, then it should be 
filed as a bug in said editor IMO; it's a standard ASCII character after 
all and a valid preprocessing token separator in ISO C (IOW the compiler 
does not ignore it, but treats according to the standard).

 As to the change proposed itself I have no opinion either way; I agree 
that the commit description leaves something to desire.

  Maciej