Re: Binary Bitwise operators with higher precedence.

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm at polyomino dot org dot uk>]

On Fri, 30 Jul 2004, Joe Buck wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 04:48:09PM -0100, Marcio Afonso Arimura Fialho wrote:
> >      C/C++ are great languages, but, despite this, they have some 
> > kudgles and flaws, as would be expected for an old language.
> 
> Nevertheless, the goal of the GCC Project is to provide a
> standards-conformant compiler, and not to try to redesign the language.
> I would not support your proposal to add new operators, as no one with
> an interest in writing portable code could use them.
> 
> The -Wall option does have several heuristics for detecting uses of & and
> | that are likely to be precedence errors.
> 
> If you're serious, then you should interact with the language standards
> committees and propose possible solutions there.

Note that committees may expect implementation experience to inform
proposals - but that doesn't mean the experience should be on GCC
mainline.  cxx-reflection-branch is a good example of features under
development for possible future standardization being implemented on a
branch.  If and when such proposals, guided by such experience, appear in
a draft of a future C++ standard, then the features may be merged to
mainline as support for that draft standard starts being added.

Extensions generally need to justify themselves by adding expressive value
to the language, which the one proposed here doesn't.

Adding support for the relevant -Wparentheses warnings to the new C++
parser (reusing the C testcases) would be a useful contribution.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    jsm28@gcc.gnu.org (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)