Re: -std's (was Re: v3 link failures analyzed)

[Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr at codesourcery dot com>]

"Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28@cam.ac.uk> writes:

| On 11 Jan 2001, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
| 
| > What I'm asking is to give an easy-to-write alias to the most recent
| > standard in effect.  I really can understand why that seems so
| > unreasonable.  For regular users, 'gxx -pedantic-errors -ansi' used to
| > be a good stringent mode for the most recent standard in effect; what
| > I'm proposing is to replace '-ansi' with something not esoteric which
| > reflects reality (since gcc -ansi as you say refers to C90).
| 
| It might have been better for GCC to have been designed with such a mode
| (-std=isowhatever -pedantic) as the default, but that's not the design we
| have now.

I don't know of any compiler which does that by default.  That is not
an excuse -- since in the past I had asked for more stringent
mode. But as I understand it, GCC is aimed at compiling GNU Whateter
language, and optionally being conforming to standards.

[...]

| > You seem to think that every programmer who happens to use GCC has a
| > copy of the standard, or need to have.  That is an unreasonable and
| > unrealistic assumption.  And I don't think it serves GCC to require
| > its users to have a copy of the standard.
| 
| If the standards bodies would learn something about selling their
| standards as ordinary books through ordinary bookshops at ordinary prices,
| then I might hope for most users indeed to have a copy of the standard.
| As is, whatever other books they use presumably describe the language as
| according to a particular version of the standard.

Certainly, but recent books treat recent standards.

| > Well, if you feel that '-std' is a better name than '-iso' then that
| > is OK with me. But, IMNHO there ought be a way to suppress GNU extensions
| > without requiring esoteric command lines.  It is about practicality.
| 
| I'm not saying that such an option should not be provided - but that it
| would get misused for warm feelings about portability as much as it would
| get properly used as a shortcut by users who know what standard version it
| refers to with their compiler and are familiar with its limitations.

There is no reason '-std' would be more misused than -std=xxxx:yyyy,
when xxxx:yyyy happen to be the most recent standard in effect.

-- Gaby
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