K&R and ISO

Ulrich Drepper drepper@cygnus.com
Fri Oct 8 10:39:00 GMT 1999


Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com> writes:

> I don't see a problem for libc itself, as long as you make sure that it
> still works to use gcc to compile K&R code with libc.  That is,
> unconditionally using prototype declarations shouldn't be a problem.

I don't understand.  Gcc can happily mix K&R code and ISO code.  Using
the -traditional flag of gcc already does not work so this is no
additional restriction.

> In the case of the new reserved words, we can just use __const et
> al as now and let gcc's lexer rather than the preprocessor deal with them;
> it already handles the __ified names for the new reserved words.

This is what I intended to do.  Simply remove the __const, __signed,
__volatile macro definitions.

> The problematic question is for the various pieces of libc that are also
> used in other packages.  You should ask gnu-prog about the needs there.
> I would be inclined to leave all those (glob, fnmatch, etc) as they are.

The only program needed for bootstrapping which takes code from glibc
is make.  For fnmatch/glob we can either leave them as is or use
ansi2knr or unprotoize.  The latter is what many GNU packages do
nowadays.

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