* K&R C compilers (i.e. compilers that don't support ANSI C from 1989)
are not in use any more.
Yeah they are. I maintain plenty of such code.
In Gnulib, we have dropped support for such
compilers in 2011, and no one complained.
No, but I had to fix bunch of such code so that it works with legacy.
* The most recent gcc and clang compilers, when used with option
-std=gnu23,
warn about K&R C functions definitions:
Sorry, but 2023 is just last year, and what clang does is more or less
irrelevant.
This option -std=gnu23 will become the default in the future, like
-std=gnu99 and later -std=gnu11 became the default.
Therefore the harm of this section is that it suggests a code style
that we know is not future-proof.
It is plenty future proof, seeing that it has worked for much longer
than the years elapsed since 2023. There is literally no harm in
keeping a section that is _optional_. The GNU Coding standards are
not mandatory, enforced, or otherwise enforced so to call this harm is
absurd.
Feel free to suggest a patch instead of exaggeration though.
