On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 11:36 AM, Stephen Paul Weber < singpol...@singpolyma.net> wrote:
> Yes. This is one of my favourite things in GHC-land -- that an existing, > good-enough, standardised, and widely-deployed solution was chosen over a > NiH reinvention of preprocessing I have to assume my irony detector is broken as well. Or maybe I should just assume that "all the world's Linux with gcc" is assumed to be forever true and forever reliable by "all right-thinking people" so let's just sweep the nonissue under the rug because it can oh so obviously never be a real issue.... Because I had to face this back a couple decades ago, when my employer ported an application written in a 4GL (database language) to SCO Unix. The 4GL assumed cpp was the ever reliable pcc one and broke very badly when SCO used one integrated into its lexer (making it even more tightly wedded to C syntax than clang's). Eventually we replaced its cpp with a wrapper that ran m4 and redid everything else in m4's syntax. Which is why I was always a bit worried about ghc relying on cpp, was unsurprised when clang caused issues, and am rather annoyed that there are people who believe that they can just ignore it because REAL users will always be on Linux with gcc and all them furriners using weird OSes like OS X and FreeBSD can safely be ignored with their not-the-One-True-OS-and-compiler platforms. Additional historical note that I assume True Believers will ignore as meaningless: X11 used to make the same assumption that cpp was always and forever guaranteed to be friendly to non-C and this still shows at times in things like xrdb resource databases. They did accept the inevitable and (mostly) stop abusing it that way, and are now moving away from imake which likewise assumes it's safe to use cpp on Makefiles. (And yes, I encounter the same inability to comprehend or accept change there.) -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allber...@gmail.com ballb...@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net
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