Re: More pgindent follies

On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 11:58:51AM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > > I don't see the problem here.  My assumption is that the comment is not
> > > part of the define, right?
> > 
> > Well, that's the question.  ANSI C requires comments to be replaced by
> > whitespace before preprocessor commands are detected/executed, but there
> > was an awful lot of variation in preprocessor behavior before ANSI.
> > I suspect there are still preprocessors out there that might misbehave
> > on this input --- for example, by leaving the text "* end-of-string */"
> > present in the preprocessor output.  Now we still go to considerable
> > lengths to support not-quite-ANSI preprocessors.  I don't like the idea
> > that all the work done by configure and c.h in that direction might be
> > wasted because of pgindent carelessness.
> 
> I agree, but in a certain sense, we would have found those compilers
> already.  This is not new behavour as far as I know, and clearly this
> would throw a compiler error.

This is good news!

Maybe this process can be formalized.  That is, each official release 
migh contain a source file with various "modern" constructs which we 
suspect might break old compilers.

A comment block at the top requests that any breakage be reported.

A configure option would allow a user to avoid compiling it, and a
comment in the file would explain how to use the option.  After a
major release, any modern construct that caused no trouble in the 
last release is considered OK to use.

This process makes it easy to leave behind obsolete language 
restrictions: if you wonder if it's OK now to use a feature that once 
broke some crufty platform, drop it in modern.c and forget about it.  
After the next release, you know the answer.

Nathan Myers
ncm@zembu.com