Re: cp/decl.c

["Jeffrey Turner" <jturner at mail dot alum dot rpi dot edu>]

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
     -Albert Einstein

>On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, Stan Shebs wrote:
>> > Good question... cp/decl.c (along with the rest of cp/*.c) is intended to
>> > be compiled by gcc (and only gcc, try it with an ISO C compiler).  I don't
>> > understand the adherence to K&R myself.
>> 
>> Jeff Law's fault. :-)  To be less flip about it, HPUX systems are
>> the last ones with no ISO compiler preinstalled, so you need to be
>> K&R only.  Not strictly required for C++, but convenient.
>
>But that only makes sense for the portions of the compiler used to
>bootstrap.  Now I realize that even though parts of cp/ may make it into
>the base C compiler, it makes _no sense_ to use K&R for the java frontend,
>does it?  But we still do...
>
>> Don't advertise this please, but I've been thinking about
>> reopening the K&R compat issue for 3.2, since it's getting
>> pretty anachronistic.
>
>Judging from Phil Edward's response, you aren't the only one.


This really makes sense - only the bootstrap section of
code should maintain maximum backward compatibility.
All other code, which ought to be compiled by gcc, should
be written using modern syntax.

I would like to join as a card-carrying maintainer myself.
I'm looking into breaking cp/decl.c into smaller files.
I hope this would include cp/decl2.c and their headers as
well.  Is anyone working on getting rid of system.h by
making configure do the work?

Thanks,

Jeff Turner