Reward for implementing Export keyword. [ was: Re: C++ export keyword ]

[Martin Sebor]

Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> Nathan Sidwell <nathan@codesourcery.com> writes:
> 
> | Martin Sebor wrote:
> | > You might find this paper illuminating:
> | > http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2003/n1426.pdf
> | At the recent Oxford meeting of wg21, this caused a lively debate.
> 
> Nice euphemism ;-)
> 
> | EDG are firmly in favour of export. The majority of the meeting
> | felt that export should remain (there were no formal votes, just an informal
> | poll). There are no plans to remove export from the language or denote it as
> | an optional part of the standard.
> 
> I would like to reaffirm the above:
> 
>   1) the double sessions (technical and "political") on "export"
>      proved that the paper contains "highly inaccurate facts" (those
>      are the words prononced during the "political" session)
> 
>   2) there were no formal votes, just a straw poll. Only 7 members
>      (out of about 40) committee members present at the meeting
>      expressed their desire to remove exoprt; the large majority of the
>      committee members present  at the meeting (30 out of about 40)
>      voted for not reopening the export issue in the future.
>      A large majority of the committee members (28 out of about 40)
>      voted for maintaining export in the language.
> 
>   3) some committee members felt that the above paper does more harm
>      (spreeding fear, uncertainty and doubt) than illumitating the
>      issue. Quotes in the papers were made out of context.
> 
>   4) EDG in its entirety was opposed to the paper, both from technical
>      point of view and "political" point of view.

I missed the meeting, so I'm surprised to hear that there was such a
wide spread lack of support for the paper given that no commercially
available compiler (other than Comeau; even the EDG 3.0 based Intel
C++ disables it) still implements the feature, and no vendor, AFAIK,
has immediate or even near term plans to implement it. I was not in
favor of removing the feature when I was asked to review the paper,
but given my experience with enabling export in our library I could
certainly empathize with many of the points the paper makes about
the difficulty and absence of benefits of using export.

Martin