On Wed, 10 Jan 1996 00:11:18 -0800 
 bwalker@musings.com (Brad Walker) wrote:

 > Could someone please explain to me why we are concerned if we maintain
 > compatibility with K&R.. I must have missed that argument. And it's not
 > a good enough argument to say that we need to maintain old code. I would
 > like to hear the why argument and not the because argument.
 > 
 > Why not mandate all new code be ANSI.. And work on porting the old stuff.

We're beating a dead horse, but... :-)

Put quite simply, code that utilized K&R-style function decls is just 
"more portable".  I quite often rip code out of NetBSD and compile it 
under SunOS (with the native compiler).  And there just might be a time 
in the future when someone with a K&R compiler needs to bootstrap NetBSD 
on some new platform...it could happen...

Of course, I don't really want to "mandate" anything.  I'd much rather 
*encourage* writing clean, portable code.

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Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
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