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
