On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 08:16:31AM +0200, Steven Bosscher wrote: > On Oct 26, 2005 02:30 AM, Joe Buck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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? Why wouldn't a one-line sed > > script that eliminates the issue altogether suffice? > > Anything that makes porting from one platform to another is a problem. > If some app doesn't compile, this customer (usually an ISV ;-) punts and > says "it doesn't work" and that is the end of it for them. Telling them > that GCC is unique and that they should use a sed script shouldn't be > necessary.
I have limited sympathy, because I've spent so much time getting past the oddities of Sun's compiler, and HP's compiler, and Microsoft's compiler, and everyone else's. Every single one of those compilers has some oddities, bugs, and nonconformance to the standard, and in most of those the compiler is provably wrong. But in many cases, the vendors will not fix the bugs (or argued for years against doing so) because of backward compatibility issues. And that is for code with specified behavior. This is a case of unspecified behavior. > I don't understand why _anyone_ sane of mind would support the idea that > it is OK that GCC does B if everyone else in the industry does A. OK, I'll be polite and assume that you don't understand me, rather than that you think I am insane. :-) That's what we have standards for: so that compilers work the same way for standard-conformant code. But in this case, we are talking about the behavior when the compiler is given code with *unspecified* behavior. I believe that people should not be writing such code. Also, I believe that people writing code that depends on behavior A are laying time bombs for their employers, setting traps that will blow up at some later date. Specifically, they are creating code that will malfunction as soon as someone strips the trailing whitespace from it. I would prefer to detect and eliminate such code, rather than to enable it, even if (and *especially if*) all compilers in the world implemented behavior A and it were required by the standard (I would want a warning option to object loudly to any code whose behavior would change if trailing whitespace were eliminated). This will be my last message on this topic.
