Re: [Swarm-Support] Re: Swarm 2.2 on Intel (and PPC) Mac OSX Tiger

[Bill Northcott]

On 24/07/2006, at 11:35 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> To disable this feature sounds fishy and a bit fascist to me, like  
> "when something is hard or confusing, forbid it".

That is not the point at all.  Your discussion of the merits of  
nested functions at the source code level is totally accepted.  The  
problem is that at least one hardware manufacturer has made it clear  
they intend to disable the low level mechanisms used by the compiler  
to implement the source code, and the gcc developers say there is no  
intention to write a different implementation in the compiler.

I have only had time for a quick glance at what Scott has done.  I  
can't see a problem with the preprocessor conditionals.  I would feel  
happier if they were more in the autotools spirit - 'configure for  
functionality not software versions'.   More specifically I would  
suggest:
1.  The mods should be in the trunk
2.  The define should by something like NO_NESTED_FUNCTIONS
3.  As a temporary measure, it should be defined by default on Darwin  
and available as a configure option.
4.  As a proper fix, we need an autoconf test to see if the compiler  
accepts nested functions and use that as the default able to be  
overridden by the builder.  I am happy to write that when I can find  
a bit of time.

Bill