On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 12:40 -0500, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: > | I think this is the wrong idea. Deprecated does carry a lot > | of weight. It allows a new compiler without a legacy > | to elide the feature and specify it is ISO compliant > | 'minus' the deprecated features, which is quite different > | from 'non-compliant'. > > Do you know of any of those compilers with user base we can talk to?
In approximation of the feature, yes: gcc! It has quite a number of switches for controlling pedantry, standards conformance, mapping errors to warnings etc. > [...] > > | Note I'm entirely agreeing with your the first line I quote > | from you above, but questioning lack of sympathy with proposals > | to deprecate features considered undesirable. > > I'm just being realistic. Code base don't just vanish overnight > because the ISO committee voted to deprecate things. I realize the > situation might be different in a totally different, imaginary, > perfect world. I agree, I wasn't suggesting removing support for deprecated features overnight: rather than you don't view deprecation unfavourably, precisely because it *doesn't* imply uncontrolled feature removal. Contrarily my point is that they can be enabled or disabled with a small number of comprehensible switches. gcc already does this kind of thing and it is good, although the exact features sets controlled by switch combinations are sometimes a bit hard to understand. -- John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net> Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net