Re: Beyond GCC 3.0

[dewar at gnat dot com]

<<Code that complies with standards will not have to be changed.  It will
always work, modulo bugs in the compiler.                >>

Sure, but this is a theoretical rather than pragmatic comment. In
practicew any large commercial application with millions of lines of code
will not be 100% compliant, and will depend on all sorts of implementation
behavior, and features outside the standard.

I do think that the guarantee of standar compliance is in fact enough in
the context of the open public development, and I would not want to see it
hampered by compatibility concerns for large commercial customers. In the
wolrd where one is supporting such customers, you most certainly cannot tell
your customer "sorry, you have to make major changes in your code, but it's
all your fault bedcause your code was n on-standard". Well you can tell them
that, but you won't stay in the support business long if you don't understand
that this attitude won't work :-)

Again, we are talking about very different requirements here, and the inherent
conflict between promoting innovation and preserving absolute compatibility 
(for all programs, not just ones that are compliant).