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Re: [tree-ssa] Merge status
> On Sun, 14 Mar 2004, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>
> > I agree. It is very easy to write casts as lvalues, and for a long
> > time gcc didn't even warn about them. In looking through the mail
> > archives, I see cogent reasons for removing the extension for C++, but
> > no good reasons to remove it for C. As far as I know, the extension
> > is umabiguous in C, and is simply syntactic sugar.
>
> Syntactic sugar and, therefore, not worth the costs in maintainability;
> extensions should add expressive value to justify themselves. See the
> amount of code removed that was to support extended lvalues as evidence.
> (There were also cases where -pedantic caused errors rather than warnings
> from extended lvalues, which did not seem worthwhile to fix - this does
> mean the deprecation warnings in 3.4 may not trigger for the case where
> the cast is to the same type.)
>
> One of the biggest users of GCC extensions is the Linux kernel; Linus
> Torvalds has supported getting rid of this extension, describing it as
> "braindamaged". I concur; code using the extension seems to be
> intrinsically obfuscated.
>
> If SPEC uses extended lvalues, how did it ever work with non-GCC
> compilers?
It has number of #ifdef __GCC__
I expect just removing them will make it work.
Honza
>
> --
> Joseph S. Myers
> jsm@polyomino.org.uk