Re: Convert 3.2 sources to ISO C90

[Marc Espie <espie at nerim dot net>]

On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 09:28:56AM -0700, Stan Shebs wrote:
> law@redhat.com wrote:
> > 
> >  In message <3CFF5E10.3D440568@apple.com>, Stan Shebs writes:
> >  > That code would be more readable if you didn't have to have all
> >  > the PARAMS and the VA_FIXEDARGS and the like, eh?
> > That stuff is pretty trivial.  Do you think the really affect the
> > readability of the code that much?
> 
> Does a 1% improvement in compiler codegen matter that much?  Not
> by itself.  You can make the same argument for any style point -
> "does putting a space before parens improve the readability of the
> code that much?".

Actually, I personally think that those spaces *degrade* readability,
but, hey, that's me.

> >  > A couple folks have pointed out that K&R C is not well-specified
> >  > either, and indeed all the compilers from the K&R era had slightly
> >  > different behavior.  Since probably nobody bootstraps on SunOS etc
> >  > anymore, the only thing we really know about GCC's K&R compat is
> >  > that it can be built with HP's bundled compiler sometimes.  Not
> >  > a very solid basis on which to write your code!
> > HP's traditional compiler has always been a good test of avoiding
> > ANSI features.
> 
> But I don't have one, nor do most GCC developers.  We basically
> have to rely on the handful of HP maintainers to be the oracles
> of whether GCC is properly K&R compatible.

And pray tell, how is that a problem, since those people are also the ones
who ARE fixing those K&R compatibility issues ?


> What are you going to do when GCC sources change in some way that
> triggers a fatal bug in HP's bundled compiler?  Are we all going to
> be required to know how to code around that bug?
> 
> Is HP really so important that we have to hobble GCC for HP's
> convenience?

I thought that GCC was supposed to be a portable compiler. Since when did
this change ?

This, for me, is an alarming trend. I can understand needing a gnat
compiler to bootstrap ada (though unpleasant that might be). I'm worried
about needing gcc 3.1 to bootstrap gcc 3.2 properly. As long as it only
affects sublanguages, that's mostly fine (though making full support for
ada on new platforms might be painful), but deliberately removing bootstrap
ability for the base compiler on some existing platforms is something I
don't quite grasp.

Yep, even with ansi2knr. Yet another tool that I trust about as far as
libtool or automake...