Re: correct "C" headers, higher priority

[Stephen M. Webb <stephen at bregmasoft dot com>]

On Thu, 31 May 2001, Benjamin Kosnik wrote:
> 
> I'm also tempted to try and hack glibc so that 
> it would work in a way similar to the solaris 8 headers. That might speed 
> development of this stuff.

That would be the right thing to do for Linux and other glibc-based
installations (when you can, do the right things).  It won't work for
everyone.

> There are now a series of bugs in GNATS about strchr, strcpy, etc all 
> being ambiguously declared, or not declared, etc. It's something that 
> everybody is going to run into and yes, it can be worked around but it's 
> kind of lame to have everything else working pretty well and have 
> something so basic tripping people up.

Yeah.  Didn't c_std used to work, event if it was no where near compliant?

> In any case, even though Mark is not requiring it for gcc-3, I think a 
> real effort should be made to make sure shadow-headers or some other, 
> more conformant than c_std option, is in working order for this release.

I've been making slow progress on my c_legacy headers idea.  It seems there
are some places in the code that depend on the c_std headers not being
compliant (that is, they introduce names in the global namespace), and as soon
as one is fixed, another pops up.  

I feel better when I check other implemetations of the C++ standard library.
With a few notable proprietary exceptions (eg. Solaris 8), nobody else has
bothered making their <c...> headers compliant.  Perhaps it's just too hard?

-- 

Stephen M. Webb
stephen at bregmasoft dot com