Re: verbose terminate() on by default, pass 2

[Nathan Myers <ncm-nospam at cantrip dot org>]

On Wed, Dec 25, 2002 at 02:40:33AM -0800, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> ... I really cannot
> understand how somebody, who claims to have thought about these issues,
> can try to argue for it.  

Consider that among all of the dozen and a half serious C++ texts I have 
immediately at hand, only two use the old C convention.  Those two were 
written by people who have never written C++ code for production.  When 
every serious, experienced writer on a topic disagrees with you, you 
really might stop to think that maybe (just maybe!) you are not quite 
so omniscient as you prefer to believe.

The rule in C++ is that only one name should be defined in a declaration.  
That eliminates every argument about dangers of lines like "char* a, b;".  
Furthermore, since in C++ declarations are mixed in with statements, it 
is usually an error to declare a name without initializing it.  When you 
declare and initialize a pointer, a notation like "char *p = q;" is a lie: 
it appears to assign *p, when in fact it is initializing p.  

In C, definitions are necessarily separate from statements, and none
of these arguments apply, so nobody suggests applying the C++ rule to C.
Only inexperience, inertia, or arrogance can argue for applying the
C rule to C++.

Nathan Myers
ncm-nospam@cantrip.org