Project proposal

[Benjamin Scherrey]

1/1/2002 7:43:54 PM, Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr@codesourcery.com> wrote:

>"Jeffrey Turner" <jturner@mail.alum.rpi.edu> writes:
>
>| In light of my recent comments on the preprocessor
>| and in keeping with the spirit of C++ 
>
>I don't know what the spirit of C++ is.  Please, could you elaborate
>on that?  Thanks.

	One of Stroustrup's tenets, along with "Don't pay for what you don't use.", is 
that reliance on pre-processors shows the limitations of the language. He's right, even 
though he freely admits that C++ still has such a reliance, albeit minimal, and is not likely 
to ever get away from it. Basically he wants the language to symantically as well as 
syntactically support the constructs that people have generally hacked via magic code 
replacement/generation on the fly. Strong type checking and templates are two of the 
key tools that make much of the previous (to those features) usage of the pre-processor 
obsolete.

	Having not looked at the specific header files in question, I'm not prepared to 
declare judgement on the applicability to these specific examples of pre-processor 
utilitzation. I will say that most pre-processor usage I encounter is better implemented via 
the language features of C++, and with no size or runtime overhead costs.

	regards,

		Ben Scherrey