Re: Project proposal

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

Benjamin Scherrey <scherrey@innoverse.com> writes:

| 1/1/2002 7:43:54 PM, Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr@codesourcery.com> wrote:
| 
| >"Jeffrey Turner" <jturner@mail.alum.rpi.edu> writes:
| >
| >| In light of my recent comments on the preprocessor
| >| and in keeping with the spirit of C++ 
| >
| >I don't know what the spirit of C++ is.  Please, could you elaborate
| >on that?  Thanks.
| 
| 	One of Stroustrup's tenets, along with "Don't pay for what you don't use.", is 
| that reliance on pre-processors shows the limitations of the language. He's right, even 
| though he freely admits that C++ still has such a reliance, albeit minimal, and is not likely 
| to ever get away from it. Basically he wants the language to symantically as well as 
| syntactically support the constructs that people have generally hacked via magic code 
| replacement/generation on the fly. Strong type checking and templates are two of the 
| key tools that make much of the previous (to those features) usage of the pre-processor 
| obsolete.

Thanks.  But I'm not sure V3 is the right place to conduct philosophical
dissertations about whether CPP is obsolete given templates.  However,
I'm sure of one thing: templates aren't macros and don't replace CPP.
Here, the primary goal is have a working library and I have to use the
tools I have at my disposal that makes me get the job done in the
limits of some resource constraints.  In particular, I'm not
interested in breaking something we spent lots of resources make
working just to meet someone's understanding spirit of C++.

| 	Having not looked at the specific header files in question,

Then, may I suggest to start there and to study why they have been
there in the first place and what has been there before?


-- Gaby
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