On Fri, 25 Mar 2022 at 10:03, Reinoud Zandijk <rein...@netbsd.org> wrote:
> > I guess they can think so because nested functions are a gcc extension. > > Quite a useful one, I think, having been taught programming with Algol > > 68 which of course does have nested functions; but an extension > > nevertheless. > > AFAIR, it comes for GCC's support for pascal which has nested functions > defined. Its just that for 'C' it was an easy addition since the compiler > already suported it. I suspect a bigger contributor may have been that all the cool languages (and Ada) supported this feature; so why not GCC. At the time (pre-EGCS?) any language trying to use GCC as a front end really struggled (except perhaps Ada), and Pascal more so than most. However this is all hearsay. My attempt at archology failed. All I found was a bug fix to the code in 1998.