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[Howard Hinnant]

On Oct 25, 2005, at 6:22 PM, Andrew Pinski wrote:

> We have people already complaining about removing extensions.  Why  
> should we change
> this implementionation defined documented behavior.

I'm not convinced that "extension" is a proper term for this  
behavior.  It is more like an incompatibility with the rest of the  
world's compilers.  The reason for change is to conform to a de-facto  
standard, and thus ease the migration of future gcc customers to our  
compiler.

These hypothetical customers coming from MS, EDG-based, or  
CodeWarrior compilers might have code that looks like:

// A poorly formatted comment \\
int x = 0;
int y = 1;
...

Note I'm not trying to defend code that looks like this.  But the  
fact is that if you've got a million lines of code that's been  
compiling with a non-gcc compiler for a decade, silly things like  
this tend to add an extra hurdle to porting to gcc.

I don't claim that gcc's behavior is better or worse than everyone  
else's.  I only claim that gcc is unique in this regard, and that  
isn't a good thing if you're trying to be friendly to customers  
wanting to adopt your product.

-Howard