[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] Drop support for gcc-2.95

[Uoti Urpala]

On Tue, 2006-07-11 at 17:27 -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 09:54:10PM +0300, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > The cost of avoiding them is higher than just the lost usefulness. Once
> > you get used to them in other code it's natural to write them quite
> > frequently, and they appear in patches, so avoiding them requires
> > several changes to code.
> 
> It's not natural to write them unless you just learned C a year or two
> ago or unless you're a C++ coder. In any case allowing them is totally

I learned C long before C99 existed and have not programmed much in C++.
It seems you're stuck with the first version of any tool your learn and
hate every improvement and change after that but you should realize that
doesn't always apply to others.

> out of the question until you supply a patch to make gcc 2.95 compile
> them and as far as I'm concerned it should be out of the question
> forever.

> Also out of the question until you supply a patch to make gcc 2.95
> handle inline asm with >10 args. If you do that I don't care about the

How about you maintain gcc 2.95 yourself if you want to keep using it?

> > I was mainly thinking of C99 features like compound literals (which 2.95
> > supports partially?)
> 
> These are fully supported by gcc 2.95. I use them all the time. Named

No they aren't. I tested it and my first testcase was miscompiled by
gcc-2.95. Seems it considered the initialized value to be const when it
wasn't.

> > and flexible array members. They're usually not
> > hard to work around using C89 syntax but still allow for nicer code.
> 
> Flexible array members are in no way better than just including a
> one-element array at the end of the structure, which is guaranteed to
> work as a consequence of other requirements in the C standard.

Wrong again. The C99 rationale explicitly mentions that the one-element
hack is undefined behavior, which was a reason to add flexible array
members. It might work with gcc and most other compilers but it is NOT
guaranteed by the C standard.

Your post was weak flaming and rants combined with factually incorrect
arguments. If you have to keep posting your rants at least try to get
the facts straight.