[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
I think that invalidating formerly standard language constructs is foolish. Making old, valid, working programs rot is causing gratuitous churn. Being able to run an old program without studying it to fix rot is one of the advantages of free software. A new version of program A, that works correctly with the current program version of B, ought to work with an old version of B when that is not fundamentally hard. For C function definitions, we were able to achieve this by writing the function definitions using the K&R syntax, and using declarations to specify the functions' prototypes. But since compiuler developers are going down the path of breaking programs that have K&R function definitions, I think there will be a smaller amount of this annoying incompatibility if we convert programs to write function definitions in ANSI C syntax. Even though it means making our programs LESS portable, it seems they have made that necessary. Would someone like to write a draft change to standards.texi? -- Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
