On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Jason R Thorpe wrote:
> 
> Well, you should be upset at the people who wrote the software which uses
> the GCC extensions, not at GCC for providing them.

but the GCC people are doing _exactly_ the same kind of thing the Redmond
Entity does: introduce nonstandard, proprietary 'extensions' to things that
are already widely accepted as standards, and then by the legions of
inexperienced developers coming up in the world starting to use the 
gcc-isms or m$oft-isms without knowing better, these 'extensions' become
de facto obligatory. Now, redmond does it as part of a deliebrate 
strategy to control more standards, and the gcc folks do it because, i am 
convinced, there are more and more people who are totally unaware of 
existing, cleaner, more well thought out ways of doing things, and 
instead of learning how to use the tools, they add a 'feature' to do what 
they want. Its at the point where even some of _those_ features have 
entered into the set of 'stuff many newbies dont take the time to learn' and
themselves are being superceded by even less well-thought-out 
'extensions'. People who daont take the time to learn how to write 
makefiles, learn to use lex and yacc, and learn to properlay maintain larger
programs, come to mind as the primary offenders. In any case, it has gone 
hand in hand with the consistent degradation of gcc over the past few 
years into a quagmire of bloat. Like brian, i try to use the vendor compilers
instead of gcc (primarily on alpha, which is the main machine i do 'real' 
work on these days as opposed to hobbyist stuff, which is pmax and vax). 

> 
> Just about every compiler provides extensions.  It's not like GCC is all
> by itself in this regard.
this is very true. However, as long as a given compiler remains in the 
minority, its extensions are not going to really become widespread in 
practice- they will remain an idiosyncracy that some makefiles will have 
a few extra lines to deal with and the 'standard' language will remain 
the majority of the code. when one compiler (or vendor, or architecture, 
or whatever) becomes so dominant, it it much more in danger of making its 
'optional extensions' mandatory, and pissing off most of the people who 
diverge from the mainstream any... i think brian's comments illustrate 
this to a T. 

isildur