Re: making coreutils depend on c99

[Albert Chin]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 08:45:15AM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Jim Meyering <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> >> Do any of you know of platforms for which that would not work?
> >> I.e., for which there is a useful (or better, `essential') compiler
> >> lacking such support?
> >
> > GCC 2.95.3 is still the C compiler for OpenBSD 3.6 (released November
> ...
> > The main undergraduate-computing cluster I use, ugrad.cs.ucla.edu, is
> ...
> 
> Thanks for the data points.
> I feel strongly enough about this that I'll go ahead nonetheless.
> I expect to provide a patch to convert the initially-few
> uses of c99-specific constructs to equivalent c89 ones.
> The manual steps required to build with a pre-c99 compiler
> will encourage stragglers to obtain/provide a more modern compiler.

Then it won't build on Solaris 2.6, HP-UX 10.20, Tru64 UNIX 4.0D, and
maybe AIX 4.3.3. Newer compilers are not available for these
platforms.

> >> I don't know of an automatic c99-to-c89 translator...
> >
> > If it's just declarations-after-statements, and it's all your own code
> > so that you can assume your own indenting style, then perhaps you
> > could write a simple translator of your own.  That's how L. Peter
> 
> I want *less* work :-)

Is it really worth it?

-- 
albert chin (address@hidden)