Re: Prefix attributes vs. grammar

[Theodore Papadopoulo <Theodore dot Papadopoulo at sophia dot inria dot fr>]

mark@codesourcery.com said:
>  The problem is that I think we're playing a losing game: the
> backwards-compatibility issues mean that I don't think we get to
> figure out what this feature should have been.  Instead, we are stuck
> with what it is.

> We were very irresponsible when we implemented these features without
> thinking them through.

> I should continue this tradition by simply implementing something
> roughly  similar to what is there now without bothering to think about
> it any more.  Probably, that would change the meaning of some
> programs, break some others, and enable some entirely new programs.
> However, I will try to be vaguely more conscientious. 

Wouldn't it be possible to implement a correct scheme and provide a 
migration program (maybe based on part of the current parser, or on the 
fixinclude framework) to cannonicalize the syntax of all attributes 
???

Run as a preprocessor, that would give the best of all worlds, compatibility
but a clean parser, with an easy migration path since we can emit 
warnings, add or supress the special preprocessor at configure time 
and eventually, add fixinclude patterns to cope with eg the windows 
headers (I do not know how easy this is though).

	Theo. 
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Theodore Papadopoulo
Email: Theodore.Papadopoulo@sophia.inria.fr Tel: (33) 04 92 38 76 01
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