Re: AC_PROG_CC_STDC

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Peter Eisentraut <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 21:00:10 -0500 (EST)

> Code that tries to be portable to K&R uses some restricted subset of C
> that is portable both ways, so it wouldn't break if we ran it through an
> ANSI C compiler.

That's how things used to be, but these days it's more like this:

  Code that tries to be portable to K&R uses some restricted subset of
  C that is supposed to be portable both ways, so in principle it
  shouldn't break if we ran it through a K&R C compiler.  However,
  (aside from GCC source code perhaps) it's hardly ever run on K&R
  hosts so it probably has bugs and won't work without some minor
  tweaks that may require major debugging to find.

And a lot of core GNU code doesn't even try to be portable these days.
shellutils, fileutils, textutils, diffutils, and gettext come to mind.
They all require many C89 features that are not in K&R.


> There is, I claim, no code that we would have to be concerned about that,
> requires K&R semantics only.

I tend to agree.


> If you're concerned about this, let's provide some sort of extra switch or
> argument to prevent AC_PROG_CC from setting ANSI C mode.

Naah.  I wouldn't bother.