Re: sane and gcc 2.96

From: Paul Floyd (paulf@free.fr)
Date: Mon Nov 20 2000 - 08:03:12 PST

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    Quoting Rene Rebe <rene.rebe@gmx.net>:

    > Could you explain me (or us) how you got to these prehistoric opinion
    > about c++?? There IS the ANSI C++ standard. And writing good c++ code
    > leads directly to well organized and maintainable programs! - Not
    > compareable with the trange spaghetti code in much c-programs. And
    > even if there would be different c++ "standards" I simply would take
    > gcc's g++ ...

    Let me start by saying that, on the whole I prefer C++ to C.

    As far as interoperability is concerned, C++ is a catastrophe. Just because
    there is a standard doesn't make the C++ compilers interoperable (since the
    "standard" doesn't set down any hard rules for linkage). Thus, your code may be
    well organized and maintainable as long as you stick to the same compiler. It
    seems from the previous comments that the latest version of g++ is not even
    backwards compatible with older versions.

    If you want, you can try to figure out how each one mangles names, and the
    calling convention for each one. Then if your lucky you might get object code
    from one C++ compiler to link with object code from another. The alternative, if
    you have the source code available, is to migrate it to the other compiler. In
    the future, when all compilers are more or less ANSI/ISO compliant (and note
    again that there are plenty of things that the standard says are "up to the
    compiler vendor"), then that might not be a big problem. However, porting
    between 2 C++ compilers that have an age gap of say 5 years won't be that
    straightforward.

    C (and this was the point that was being made) generates object code that can be
    linked to with almost universal ease. Even interpreted languages link easily to
    C object code.

    There are large research projects into how to tackle the enormous problems of
    "legacy OO code" (mainly C++).

    A bientot
    Paul

    -- 
    Paul Floyd   http://paulf.free.fr for those with time to waste
    What's the point? The sharp thing on the end.
    

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