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Re: c++ "with" keyword
- From: Gianni Mariani <gmariani at chaincast dot com>
- To: Robert Dewar <dewar at gnat dot com>
- Cc: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2003 14:12:55 -0800
- Subject: Re: c++ "with" keyword
- Organization: Chaincast, Inc
- References: <20030104205839.01F99F2D52@nile.gnat.com>
- Reply-to: gmariani at chaincast dot com
Robert Dewar wrote:
I argue that it is not trivially fixable. In the case of a third party
library, it is virtually impossible to guarentee that introducing a new
member will not break any clients of the library.
It may certainly break any clients who use the WITH feature, but that is
their choice. Anyone who uses WITH on a 3rd party library is accepting
that updates to the library that add names may possibly cause some
illegalities, just as someone using USE in Ada takes this "risk".
But the user of the library knows immediately that the problem has
arisen and can fix it trivially.
I beg to differ.
Maintaing source compatability where possible with new library versions
(without having to mess with clients) is an important aspect of interfaces.
Any language construct that fails in this regard (like with) is very bad
- period.
Again, our perspectives on what is important is different, as a library
maintainer, I see this as much more important an issue than you do.