backwards compatibility/cross-compiler compatibility

[scleary@jerviswebb.com]

Just a quick question:

How concerned are we about maintaining backwards compatibility (I don't mean
for deprecated features in the standard, but stuff like "construct" and
"destroy", which are left in for "backwards compatibility for HP STL").
(Actually, that's a bad example because these "features" break our
implementation namespace.)

Also, what is the classification of libstdc++?  Are we a library only for
egcs (in which case we can use compiler-specific optimization techniques),
or are we a general-purpose library.  If the latter, can we impose minimum
requirements on the compilers that want to use the library (i.e., support
member templates, etc.) so we can get rid of a lot of the #ifdef's, which
(IMHO) clutter up the code?  (They also make the code difficult to change,
because a test compile with egcs only tests one element of all the possible
permutations of these #define's; it would be easy to add a member function
that works with egcs but breaks in a lesser compiler because all the testing
is done with egcs.)

	-Steve