Re: Attribute questions

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Mark Mitchell wrote:
> 
> 3. The manual contains anti-#pragma rhetoric.  As far as I can tell,
>    that rhetoric isn't really longer valid.

One of the reasons to keep it is to discourage people from adding
and using pragmas willy-nilly.  At least twice in the past several
years I've talked to people who saw the editorializing in the GCC
manual and were thereby discouraged from insisting on adding a pragma
to the compiler.  Users are always going to want to solve problems by
hacking the compiler, and given that GCC sources are available for the
hacking, the commentary in the manual is one of our few ways to head
off this kind of thing before it becomes somebody's hard requirement.

Pulling back to a broader view, the GCC manual is one of our chief
vehicles for communicating with users.  We have the choice of
limiting it to just a bald description of options and features,
or to have it help people use the compiler better.  The latter
is clearly preferable, but you can't accomplish it without
including value judgements about the options and features that
should be preferred, and the ones that should be avoided.  We
certainly express lots of value judgements on this list (witness
the discussion of Pascal strings :-) ), and it seems only fair to
share our expertise and insight with our users via the manual.

Stan