Re: type based aliasing again

[Richard Stallman <rms at gnu dot org>]

    And when those invalid programs will break, 

Not when--if.  It is possible for some of these programs
to break again, but we can confidently expect that most of them
will not break again.

This is an example of the sort of exaggeration that I have encountered
over and over again in arguments for harshness.  It is not a good
thing for GCC maintenance decisions to be based on exaggerations like
this.

						we'll find the same
    persons arguing that GCC used to support those porgrams and should
    continue to do the right thing it used to.  

Most of these cases will never again break, but some may.  If and when
that happens, we could well find SOME of the same people complaining
who complained about the same case before.

However, if the case that fails is in an April 1999 version of a
program, and if the December 1999 version has different code because a
warning advised the programmer to fix it, and if the case actually
breaks in 2001, then the programmer will not complain.  And most of
the users who compile that package will use a more recent version, so
they will not complain either.

Thus, we will get only a fraction of the number of complaints we
will get now.


Would people please stop making arguments which exaggerate to
the worst case?