Re: m4-1.4.7: summary of successes

[Eric Blake]

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According to Nelson H. F. Beebe on 9/28/2006 12:15 PM:
> I now have completed more than 120 build attempts for m4-1.4.7 on 29
> different flavors of Unix, and all of my systems now have m4-1.4.7
> installed.

Thanks for the report.

> More than 100 of these builds and test-suite validations have been
> successful, with C compilers, and on some systems, C++ compilers.
> 
> A few more typecasts at various places in the source code could
> increase the C++ success rate: the stricter ones do not accept
> a statement like this one:

M4 does not necessarily have c++ compilation as a goal.  This is because
it uses gnulib, and gnulib uses regex from glibc, and the glibc
maintainers refuse to support c++ compilation of C code.  C++ is not a
strict superset of C, and trying to make m4 use the subset common to both
languages is a time-consuming task that sometimes looks ugly to someone
used to strict C.  However, I do agree that there are some benefits of
increased type-checking in C++, so I might try to make 2.0 work as C++.
But it isn't worth hacking up the 1.4.x branch for this.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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