Re: generalized lvalues

[Matt Austern <austern at apple dot com>]

On Nov 17, 2004, at 9:28 PM, Joe Buck wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 08:21:21PM -0800, Matt Austern wrote:
> > Yep, and I'm still not arguing against removing it.  I'm just asking
> > for help in collecting a list of the reasons why we chose to get rid 
> > of
> > it.  I don't think this discussion will go away, and having that list
> > will be helpful.  I think a number of us will be asked: (a) why did
> > this extension disappear; and (b) how should I change my code to cope
> > with the disappearance.  I'd like to be prepared with answers to those
> > questions.
>
> I doubt if you will get the flood of questions you anticipate, because
> few people even knew that the extension was there.  It is possible that
> someone has a production program that is not valid C++ that will now
> break, but if this happens we just tell them how to fix the program.

I hope you're right.  I take the pessimistic view that there are lots of
programmers who have no idea what the language definition is for
the language they're using, but just throw code at the compiler until
the compiler produces an executable that seems to work.  So I think
there may be some people who are using the cast-as-lvalue
extension even if they don't know what a cast or an lvalue is.

			--matt