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Re: [4.1] UCNs in identifiers
On Fri, 7 Jan 2005, Geoffrey Keating wrote:
> 1. GCC's stated goal is to be standards-conformant. The standard is quite
RMS would say otherwise (that it is to be guided rather than ruled by
standards). I don't, however, like "appeal to authority" as a basis for
such technical decisions. When we choose not to implement the standard by
default, the normal way is to have an option to enable conformance. I
think using the existing -std=c99 -pedantic / -std=c++98 -pedantic for
this suffices - in fact I think we should just allow the precise list of
identifier characters in the relevant standard, without needing a strict
-std option to enable UCNs in identifiers or -pedantic to disable other
characters - but if necessary an additional option -fextended-identifiers
could be used (though I think that needing such extra options for
conformance is a mistake). By all means have default or non-default
warnings for problematic cases.
> clear. The fact that you do not like the consequences of what the standard
> says is unfortunate, and I do encourage you to get the standards fixed in the
> very obscure case of certain Hebrew characters, but that's insufficient reason
> to not implement the standard. We implement the standard in cases even where
> the feature is completely objectionable, like trigraphs, and this is not
> nearly that bad.
I would also repeat, as I said in comment#12 in that PR, that changes to
the standard are best based on implementation experience, and UCNs in
identifiers cannot be shown to be a mistake without there being
implementations of them in use and actual problems arising.
--
Joseph S. Myers http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
joseph@codesourcery.com (CodeSourcery mail)
jsm28@gcc.gnu.org (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)