Re: nested classes style question

[Olaf Till]

On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 05:01:20PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 11/16/2017 01:13 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> >I'm thinking specifically of the scope and symbol_record classes that are
> >nested inside the symbol_table class.  Would anyone object to moving the
> >symbol_record and scope classes to separate files and declaring them
> >outside of the symbol_table class?  As far as I can see, backward
> >compatibility

I assume you mean backward compatibility with packages...

> >with the old symbol_table::scope or
> >symbol_table::symbol_record can be handled with a couple of typedefs.

Do you mean a header in core Octave with something like:

namespace octave
{
  // OCTAVE_DEPRECATED (...) ?
  typedef symbol_record symbol_table::symbol_record
  ...
}

?

Surely good to have something like this, but whether this is
sufficient for packages depends on how long it will be present in
Octave and on whether it's deprecated or not. Deprecated things tend
to be avoided by packages. And previous experience is that such
backwards compatibilities don't remain in Octave long enough to be
relied on by packages (those which support many Octave versions).

So this change is probably another one which has to be explicitely
cared for by packages supporting multiple Octave versions. But well,
it doesn't seem to add much effort. Of the maintained packages in
Octave Forge, only one references symbol_table::symbol_record, and
none references symbol_table::scope.

Summary: no objections...

Olaf

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