On Sun, 27 Feb 2005, Eric Botcazou wrote: > > In cases where breaking sources lets you achieve greater performance or > > efficiency, please do make the change but offer a switch to disable it and > > let the old code still compile. This way we it seems everybody can be > > happy. > > My impression is that this has nothing to do with performance and efficiency, > unfortunately.
Indeed, it's about maintainability instead, and improving maintainability and flexibility of implementation strategies by removing an ill-thought-out or undocumented extension is incompatible with keeping it under a switch. In the case mentioned of __FUNCTION__ concatenation, (a) __FUNCTION__ was always documented as a variable, so concatentation of it was always undocumented and so liable to removal at any time (if you like and use an undocumented extension and want it to stay around, you need to submit documentation for it); (b) concatenation of it should never have been expected to make sense in view of the C phases of translation where string constant concatenation happens in a phase before functions are identified, so the fact it did work was really a bug; (c) the handling of string constant concatenation has been overhauled more than once and some of those overhauls were incompatible with concatenation of __FUNCTION__. -- Joseph S. Myers http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal mail) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (CodeSourcery mail) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)
