http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=58887
--- Comment #7 from joseph at codesourcery dot com <joseph at codesourcery dot com> --- On Sun, 27 Oct 2013, mtewoodbury at gmail dot com wrote: > That has not always stopped you all in the past, but that is really neither We have plenty of experience dealing with the consequent problems of the old habit of adding extensions because they seemed like a good idea at the time (or because a feature was supported in some language other than C, and there used to be an idea that GNU C should support all features of GCC's internal representation that could be accessed from any language supported by GCC) without any real effort in designing them at the level of precise proposed standard text to specify the feature. Based on that experience, the bar for new extensions is much higher now. Unlike recursion, __VA_ARGC__ seems like something reasonably well-defined and in accordance with the spirit of the preprocessor and unlikely to be problematic as an extension - but as you note, there's already a separate bug for it.