building Octave 3.4.3 with recent Intel compilers

[Kenneth Hoste]

Hello,

I'm trying to build the last stable release of Octave (v3.4.3) using
recent Intel compilers (v2011.6.233) on Scientific Linux v5.6 (x86_64).

We have built Octave 3.2.4 in the past using Intel compilers, so
although GCC is used more often, I would expect it to also work for more
recent Octave versions (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Here's are the errors I'm running into:

../libgnu/stdio.h(915): error: declaration is incompatible with previous
"getchar" (declared at line 448 of "/usr/include/stdio.h")
  _GL_CXXALIAS_SYS (getchar, int, (void));
  ^
../libgnu/stdio.h(1182): error: declaration is incompatible with
previous "putchar" (declared at line 490 of "/usr/include/stdio.h")
  _GL_CXXALIAS_SYS (putchar, int, (int c));
  ^
../libgnu/stdio.h(1536): error: declaration is incompatible with
previous "vprintf" (declared at line 348 of "/usr/include/stdio.h")
  _GL_CXXALIAS_SYS_CAST (vprintf, int, (const char *format, va_list args));
  ^
misc/quit.h(124): remark #424: extra ";" ignored
  };
   ^
compilation aborted for misc/f77-extern.cc (code 2)
make[2]: *** [misc/libcruft_la-f77-extern.lo] Error 1


I've tried to figure out what's going on, but I haven't been able to
figure out what the issue is exactly.
As far as I understand, the _GL_CXXALIAS_SYS macro tries to create a C++
wrapper for C functions (like e.g. getchar, putchar, ...).
For some reason icpc (the Intel C++ compiler) is spotting this as an
attempt to redeclare the existing getchar/putchar functions.

Has anyone run into an issue like this before, or know how to fix this?

I've tried to find a way to make the compiler just warn me about this,
instead of throwing an error (which I think might be OK), but haven't
been able to so far...


Kenneth