Extensionless headers

[Phil Edwards]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 08:24:06PM +0000, Nathan Myers wrote:
> What you talking about is substituting directory placement for filename 
> extensions.

Yes, I can see where this will be a problem.

> Then you have to maintain a complete list of the directories 
> where headers can go.

This is a red herring.  We already maintain such a list; it's in the
compiler.  We manipulate it with -I options.

> Scripts that operate on sources have to arrange to 
> skip the non-headers, somehow.

I've already given the find command for this (although I forgot to prune
the CVS subdirs; note that this won't be a problem for users).  Yes,
it's annoying for us developers, and I would like to see this changed,
but it's not a world-shattering problem.

> And all for what?  The other projects and the rest of the Gcc team
> will be forced to admire our cleverness and the elegance of our header 
> names.  They will all adopt our elegant solution and thank us for our 
> cleverness in their respective ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS files.

I almost stopped reading here, based on my personal "ignore the rude
people" policy.  This gets us nowhere.  Stop it.

> Let's do this instead.  (This is a lot like Phil's suggestion.)

I'd like to hear what you find wrong with my suggestion.  We got into
this because we wanted to simplify the header file scheme, which IMHO is
a good idea.  Your proposal sounds like it's reintroducing that complexity
on a per-header basis.  Mine keeps things simple across the board.


Phil

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