Re: compile on Cray/ nonGNUcompiler

[John W. Eaton]

FWIW:

When I started working on Octave, there were no ANSI/ISO standard C++
compilers, or even any ANSI/ISO standard.

Rather than try to make Octave portable to many different environments
and compilers, it seemed easier to make it work with g++, which was
itself portable to most systems that I cared about.  Even making
Octave work with g++ has been a challenge, as the language has evolved
and g++ has changed.  Even so, to me it was worth using C++ instead of
just C since I still believe that C++ has many advantages over plain
old ordinary C.

It's not that I'm against standards, or that I want to force everyone
to use g++.  I generally prefer free (as in freedom, not necessarily
price) solutions, but I do understand that g++ does not work on all
systems on which people might want to use Octave.

I'm willing to work toward making Octave more compliant with the
current standard(s), but not at the expense of compiling with the
current release of g++.  I don't really care about any version of g++
before 2.95.x.  So, since I'm not as up-to-date as others may be about
what features are or are not supported, can anyone tell me if this is
a reasonable goal?

Other than g++, I think the only C++ compiler that I have available to
me that is Sun CC on a SunOS 5.7 system, which reports the following
version information:

  CC: WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15 C++ 5.0

I tried using this last night, and immediately ran into the same
problems Mumit reported (mostly namespace and forward declaration
problems).  Does anyone know if it is reasonable to expect this
compiler to do the job?  I had no trouble compiling Octave's C and
Fortran code using the corresponding C and Fortran compilers on the
same system.

Thanks,

jwe



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