On 24.09.2017 23:03, Branko Čibej wrote:
On 24.09.2017 22:05, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
Branko Čibej wrote on Sun, 24 Sep 2017 21:56 +0200:
What /I/ don't understand is why we're even having a discussion about
using // comments. Is it really that hard to type two extra chars per
comment, especially since any sane programming editor will add the
delimiters in for you anyway?
If the discussion were about more interesting features such as
*restrict*ed pointers or mixed statements and variable declaration or
*for*-scope variable declarations, that'd make some sense. But talking
about just "C90 + //" is, IMO, a waste of time.
About //-comments specifically, my thinking was that if we supported such
comments we wouldn't run into "//-comments v. /**/-comments" conflicts
when updating our embedded utf8proc.
Given what that merge looked like, the // comments were a minor issue :D
The whole discussion grew out of all proportion because I thought I
could leave the comments in and instead tell compilers to be smart about
them.
But to your wider point, I agree, //-comments aren't _the_ most
pressing C99 feature we might wish to adopt. I was just trying to take
a "one step at a time" approach. So, can we switch from C89 to C89 +
any single C99 feature? E.g., C89 + <one of the features you just named>.
The problem with the feature cherry-picking approach is that we don't
have a reliable way for compilers to warn about when /other/ features
except the blessed ones appear in the code.
If we want to take the Great Leap Forward, I'd prefer to just move to
C99 lock, stock and barrel instead. That would likely cause problems to
some of our downstream users, however.
I fully agree with Brane on this.
Another thing that has popped up in the past and that I, personally,
would love to see happening is supporting C++ inside our libs. I think
that would have it made easier to me, using wrapper classes / templates
with appropriate operator overloading, to migrate code from one API /
data structure to another.
However, that move too, would create all sorts of compatibility issues
with rules to address them and all for a limited increase in coding
convenience.
-- Stefan^2.
