Re: Strange pedantic error message

[Michael Matz <matzmich at cs dot tu-berlin dot de>]

Hi,

On Thu, 8 Feb 2001 dewar@gnat.com wrote:

> <<In engineering it's almost always a bad idea to rely on a single source
> or ``vendor''. That's what standards are for.
> >>
> 
> Again, please let's not be absolute,

"almost always" ... doesn't seem absolute to me.

> if so, that's a perfectly reasonable viewpoint. Indeed if there were
> multiple free software C compilers, then this would be a stronger issue

There are.

> The point here is to be more neutral, it is really quite inappropriate on
> the gcc.gnu.org list to suggest that people should never use GNU C, which
> is the language compiled by gcc. 

That was never suggested.  Instead it was suggested, that it might be a
good idea, to know, if and when one programs in GNU C, where setting
-pedantic everywhere would help, as the user would have to think
explicitely about _not_ giving that flag to specifically use GNU C.  This
of course would be the reason for -pedantic to be default, which is too
strong, but as suggestion to use -pedantic everywhere, where possible,
this is reasonable.

> If you want to write in GNU C, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do,
> then there are currently not too many "multiple vendors" and presumably
> if there were, then they would conform to the language standard :-)

There are some vendors implementing some GNU extensions in GNU
compatibility mode.  As that "standard" has changed also in GCC itself,
they are in one way also standard conformant, even if they may be don't
implement all extensions the way GCC does.

> your project opens up a Pandora (I think that is the usual spelling
> from the Greek)

You have to add something to everything, don't you?  It's tiring.


Ciao,
Michael.