Strange pedantic error message

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Thu, 8 Feb 2001 dewar@gnat.com wrote:
> So once again, this is not a matter of "good idea" or "bad idea", it is
> simply a matter of choosing options appropriately. Since we are gnu.org,
> we presume that participants are primarily interested in the development
> of Free Software, so it is definitely NOT a good idea in this forum to
> take the position that the language GNU C should not be used!

I do not see a strong correlation between developing free software in
general and relying on proprietary extensions of specific free tools.

Of course there is a stronger correlation if we are considering GNU
exclusively, but by far not all free software is GNU, so your conclusion
does not logically follow.

In engineering it's almost always a bad idea to rely on a single source
or ``vendor''. That's what standards are for.

This is not to say that extensions are bad, but they have to be used with
care. And when people use extensions without evening knowing that they are
doing so, this is a Pandorra's box.

Gerald
-- 
Gerald "Jerry" pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/