On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 9:53 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <i...@google.com> wrote: > Achilleas Margaritis <axil...@gmail.com> writes: > >> How much do you spend in maintaining headers? answers welcomed from >> other members as well. > > In C++, I personally spend very little time doing what I would describe > as "maintaining headers." I write class definitions in .h files and > function implementations in .cc files. The only data which appears in > both places is the function signature. Yes, it would be slightly nice > if I didn't have to write that twice. But it's a minor issue.
Don't you ever had to modify the classes after you've written them? I am surprised, because I have talked to other developers and they have too said that it would be nice if headers could be avoided. > > Of course these days I mostly work on Go, which doesn't have this issue > at all, because the language implements something along the lines of the > C++ modules proposal. Which I think is the right way to go. Don't get > confused by the language standardization process here; your proposal is > also a change to the language. The pace of the standardization process > is independent of whether gcc should implement a language change. The > important point is that in order to implement what you want, the > question is not whether to change the language, it is how to change it. > And how it should be changed is the way that works best for most people, > which need not be the way that most nearly replicates the way the > language currently works. > > Ian > I do think that the modules proposal is the way to go, but I don't see that happening soon. I may have retired when the modules proposal is usable :-). My proposal does not change the language in any way, it only is a copy-and-paste job.
