Re: Positioning GCC_ATTR_DEPRECATED

[John W. Eaton]

On 12/29/2015 03:56 PM, Rik wrote:

> I think it's a good idea to rename to OCTAVE_ATTR_NORETURN.  But, I would
> prefer to keep this attribute at the end of the declaration if possible.

It is possible to place (the C++11 standard) [[noreturn]] attribute at 
either the beginning or end of the declaration or definition.  For the 
GCC-specific __attribute__((noreturn)), it can't go at the end of 
definitions, so then we must provide a separate declaration if we want 
to put the attribute at the end.  So do we sometimes put these 
attributes at the beginning and sometimes at the end?  It seems 
complicated to remember and describe this in our coding standards.  It 
would be much simpler to just say "put them at the beginning".

Yeah, it does get kind of messy if we are writing things like

  extern OCTAVE_ATTR_NORETURN OCTAVE_API void
  foobar (args, ...);

or

  extern OCTAVE_API void
  foobar (args, ...) OCTAVE_ATTR_NORETURN;

I don't really see that one is better than the other.

Note that the OCTAVE_API macro is also an attribute.  It is currently 
only used on Windows systems but we should probably also use visibility 
attributes on other systems that support them.

jwe