Re: release candidate 5 available

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2005 at 10:11:01PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     > Maybe it'd be useful to keep the -ansi flag for development builds, but 
have 
     > it turned off for dist builds.  I think automake has a way of doing 
this, but
     > I'd have to look up how to do it.
     
     What advantages do you see in using -ansi?

"Be conservative in what you produce; liberal in what you accept."
Using -ansi in development catches things that are not part of the standard
and therefore might not be accepted by other compilers.

It's not foolproof --- I found this text in the GCC manual:

     Some users try to use `-pedantic' to check programs for strict ISO
     C conformance.  They soon find that it does not do quite what they
     want: it finds some non-ISO practices, but not all--only those for
     which ISO C _requires_ a diagnostic, and some others for which
     diagnostics have been added.

     A feature to report any failure to conform to ISO C might be
     useful in some instances, but would require considerable
     additional work and would be quite different from `-pedantic'.  We
     don't have plans to support such a feature in the near future.


Notwithstanding that, the -ansi flag does go part of the way.
For example, without -ansi, gcc will merily accept // style comments which
are not part of the ansi standard (until recently).

J'

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