Re: ABI problems in ncurses-5.5

[Thomas Dickey]

On Wed, 24 May 2006, Stanislav Ievlev wrote:

> On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 10:27:41AM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > > breaks user's code.
> > > If you want to support a some legacy compillers, it's better to create
> > > new configure switch to select generation between inlines or macros.
...
> I've said about definitions like addch.
> A definition like this can break c++ classes with a method called "addch",
> or my own addch functions in a different c++ namespace.
>
> It's too hard to detect such problems.

Some other implementations of curses have a symbol such as NOMACROS which
might be nice to add to ncurses.  That would solve this particular 
problem - for the predominant case where there is also a function with the 
same name.

Making things inline has a couple of drawbacks: breaks compatibility with
existing applications (since the inlined function doesn't have the same 
scope) and breaks configure scripts.  One of the annoyances for glibc for 
instance was the haphazard application of inlining to POSIX functions such 
as stat().

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net