RFA: Deprecate C++ options

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Tim Hollebeek wrote:

> In the real world, people need to be able to compile old software.  I
> propose that the lifetime of -fno-for-scope and friends be mandated to
> be no shorter than that of -traditional (conservatively, let's call
> that 1-2 decades).  Yes, it is a PITA for compiler developers to support

 ... and it's over a decade since C89 was released, somewhat longer than
that since ANSI C drafts were being widely distributed and used, so what
do people think of deprecating -traditional now and removing it in 3.2?  
The rationale from a proposal to remove -traditional I drafted a while ago
is:

-traditional complicates the compiler with code to support
(incompletely) a poorly defined language dialect that has been
obsoleted by a language standard for over a decade (and to a large
extent by widely distributed ANSI C drafts for some time before that).
Because of the use of flag_traditional in dwarf2out.c and dwarfout.c,
other front ends gratuitously need to include definitions of it.
-traditional does not work with the GNU C library, and in general has
become obsolete, not useful (the only times I've actually wanted
pre-ISO C compilation have been for old IOCCC entries, and
-traditional hasn't worked for them) and a maintenance burden because
of additional code to understand and preserve when changing the
compiler, instead of simply following the C standard; I don't know
pre-ISO C so there's no guarantee that such -traditional behaviour
will get correctly preserved.  Previous versions of the compiler
remain available for people wanting -traditional support.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk