Re: RFA: Deprecate C++ options

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

--On Thursday, September 06, 2001 11:21:36 PM +0100 "Joseph S. Myers" 
<jsm28@cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Tim Hollebeek wrote:
>
>> In the real world, people need to be able to compile old software.  I
>> propose that the lifetime of -fno-for-scope and friends be mandated to
>> be no shorter than that of -traditional (conservatively, let's call
>> that 1-2 decades).  Yes, it is a PITA for compiler developers to support
>
>  ... and it's over a decade since C89 was released, somewhat longer than
> that since ANSI C drafts were being widely distributed and used, so what
> do people think of deprecating -traditional now and removing it in 3.2?

I would support this, too -- even though it seems somewhat more
radical.  I agree that I have not found a good use for -traditional
in ages; the code that I have seen that needs pre-ISO stuff uses enough
weird stuff that even -traditional does not support that it still doesn't 
work.

The key point is not that it's not a useful feature -- it's that it's
not useful unless it really works.  Given unlimited resources, I'd
definitely keep it; without them, I'm tempted to focus on the bigger
wins.  It's nearly certain that no GNU software needs this flag; I
wonder if anyone wants to search the Debian package distributions to
see if any of them are built with -traditional?

We would need nearly 100% consensus here to have a shot at getting
this past the SC and the FSF, I suspect.  I am not optimistic.

-- 
Mark Mitchell                mark@codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery, LLC            http://www.codesourcery.com