Subject: Re: C Language Standard(s)
To: Robert Black <r.black@ic.ac.uk>
From: Alan Barrett <apb@iafrica.com>
List: current-users
Date: 01/07/1996 15:35:29
Replying to month-old mail...

> Hmm, if we really wanted to move to ANSI C type function declarations
> we could wrap cpp in something which would do ANSI->K&R declaration
> conversion on architectures which can only handle K&R. This wouldn't
> be amazingly difficult to write and if anyone is interested I'll look
> into it.

Wietse Venema's "unproto" has been doing exactly that for several years.
Get it from ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/unix/unproto5.shar.Z.  It has
worked fine for me with an oldish HP compiler under HP-UX 7.0.

I don't quite understand why we need pre-ANSI C for bootstrapping
anything, because it seems to me that one should be able to make a gcc
cross-compiler to run on an already supported platform and generate
code for a new platform.  Obviously I must be missing something.  So,
assuming that it is necessary to use pre-ANSI C compilers on most of
the source tree, I would prefer to see a scheme using something like
"unproto", rather than the present system of using __P() macros and
stuff.

--apb (Alan Barrett)