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[Stan Shebs]

Joe Buck wrote:

>On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 08:22:15PM -0400, Howard Hinnant wrote:
>
>>And it is not my assertion that gcc's behavior is better or worse  
>>than other compilers.  Only that gcc's behavior is unique in the  
>>industry (I actually haven't tried all other modern compilers) and  
>>that uniqueness in this way is not an asset to gcc.
>>
>
>gcc is "unique in the industry" in any number of ways, as is every
>other compiler -- in that each of them will have some kind of behavior
>that is perhaps odd, but might have been accidentally exploited by
>a programmer who just whacks away at code and accepts anything that
>happens to compile.
>
>I'm still waiting for an explanation as to why this is an important
>issue, other than that someone has a customer who says that it is.
>Why is it important to the customer?
>
With all that's going on in politics right now :-) , we Appleites
are being somewhat careful to not give away too much detail
about the users in question. I think it's safe to say that they
are large important code bases, and that this is a historic
opportunity for GCC to displace proprietary compilers out of
some longtime strongholds. Thus we want to ease the transition,
not put up additional obstacles, especially over borderline-
pedantic issues (one-line sed script is easy, revving multiple
multi-million-line source bases, not so much).

Again, I think this could be easily addressed in Apple's GCC only,
but that will mean that the software in question will compile on Macs,
but not on GNU/Linux. Of course, having apps on OS X that can't
be ported to Linux is not necessarily a bad thing from Apple's
point of view... :-)

Stan