Re: making coreutils depend on c99

[Paul Eggert]

Albert Chin <address@hidden> writes:

> Substitute the code in the c99.c file with any
> other C99 idiom and the results should be the same.

That hasn't been my experience.  For example, many C89 compilers
support "long long" in some form, even though it's a C99 idiom.
Similarly for compound literals, inline, restrict, _Bool, non-constant
initializers for auto aggregates, etc.

The Autoconf Way is to test for each new-to-C99 feature separately,
and coreutils already does this to some extent.  For example, it
checks for 'inline', 'restrict', _Bool, and 'long long' separately.
No doubt more checks could be added.

The big difference here is that the above-mentioned features, like the
struct hack, are relatively easy to configure using C macros, in a
useful way.  Statements-before-declarations is not.  That is why the
statements-before-declarations requirement of some coreutils files is
a special issue.