Implications of tighter integration of libg++

[John A. Tamplin]

On Mon, 9 Feb 1998, Joe Buck wrote:

> Even so, perhaps a backward compatibility layer could be written.  But it
> might be easier just to ship two libstdc++ versions with different major
> version numbers than to try to figure out how to make one library do.  The
> whole reason for using the std namespace is so that users are freed up to
> use the hundreds of names the standard library takes away.  Any scheme
> that tries to preserve backward compatibility will also pollute the
> namespace (preventing users from using certain identifier names), meaning
> that we won't have a conforming compiler.

Why couldn't you just have the compatibility layer in a separate library?
That way those symbols would only be used if it were explicitly added to
the link command.  For those sites that didn't care about using the 
previously reserved symbols, it could be automatically linked or even be
included as a separate object in the standard library.

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