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
