On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 11:21:57AM +0100, Chris Wareham wrote:
> 
> And to those that see compiler extensions as some natural evolution
> of the C language, I think it's worth pointing out that computers
> aren't human beings. Human languages evolve through so called 'slang'
> which may eventually become part of the codified language by
> inclusion in dictionaries. Humans, however, can puzzle around curious
> slang terms, but computers (or more precisely compilers) don't have
> this intuition. So when I take a program written in 'gcc C' and try
> to compile it on the native Tru64 or Solaris compiler, it simply
> wont build.
> 
> The correct approach to language extensions should be an 'opt in'.
> Gcc enables its extensions by default, and requires me to add the
> -ansi and -pedantic options to produce 'real C'.  It would be better
> to have command line options that enabled extensions, clearly
> marking code (like the Linux kernel for example) as *not* ANSI
> compliant. Then if these extensions prove invaluable, they should
> be evaluated at the next C standard meeting.

i think this here is the part about GCC that iritates me.  it seems that not
long after ANSI C started to come into play, GCC came along and completely
ignored the ANSI C standard.  it's almost as if the attitude of the FSF was
that commercial compilers were bad, so they wanted to make them harder to use.

i don't object to extentions to the language, but i do object to them not being
properly added to the ANSI standard, the whole point of which was that it didn't
matter what compiler you used, since they were all ANSI C compliant, your code
Just Built(TM) on any of them.  that is so far from true today it's revolting.

porting used to be handling quirky differences between platforms, and in most
cases was a rather small task.  porting these days means from GCC C to ANSI C
because not only do some of us think commercial compilers kick butt, in some
cases GCC doesn't generate good code, or sometimes doesn't generate working
code at all (i am constantly reminded of that with SPARC64 and MIPS64)

-brian
-- 
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