Re: making coreutils depend on c99

[Paul Eggert]

Jim Meyering <address@hidden> writes:

> Do any of you know of platforms for which that would not work?
> I.e., for which there is a useful (or better, `essential') compiler
> lacking such support?

GCC 2.95.3 is still the C compiler for OpenBSD 3.6 (released November
2004), and it doesn't support declarations after statements.  So
OpenBSD 3.6 users would have to install their own C compiler, or
upgrade to OpenBSD 3.7 (released May of this year).  Installing their
own compiler might be tricky for some non-x86 hosts.
The only OpenBSD host I have regular access to is still running
OpenBSD 3.4, so it couldn't build a declarations-after-statements
coreutils unless I also installed a newer GCC there.

The main undergraduate-computing cluster I use, ugrad.cs.ucla.edu, is
still running Solaris 8 with Sun WorkShop 6 update 2 C 5.3.  This
compiler doesn't support declarations after statements (as that
feature wasn't introduced until Forte Developer 7 C 5.4).  I've tried
to have them upgrade that compiler more than once, but haven't
succeeded yet.  At my request GCC is also installed on that host
(version 3.3.4), but the admins prefer to use Sun cc to build the
stuff they install, so they couldn't easily install coreutils.
(On the other hand, if coreutils required C99 perhaps I could
finally talk them into upgrading their compiler....)


> I don't know of an automatic c99-to-c89 translator...

If it's just declarations-after-statements, and it's all your own code
so that you can assume your own indenting style, then perhaps you
could write a simple translator of your own.  That's how L. Peter
Deutsch got dragooned into writing ansi2knr.c lo these many years ago.
It turned into a bigger task than he thought it would, though.
Personally I'm glad that ansi2knr.c is now dead as a dodo.

The only GNU project I know that assumes C99 is glibc, but it assumes
GCC as well, which is pretty strong.

Sorry to throw so much cold water on the idea, but cold water is my
specialty sometimes....