Re: [RP] patches to make it compile with very old compilers

[Matthias Kilian]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 10:30:15PM -0700, Shawn Betts wrote:
> > - makes it work with some gcc 2.9x compilers.
> > - we are 10 years after c99
> 
> Portability is all well and good but, with respect, why do we care
> about old versions of gcc and pre-c99 compilers?

There are some architectures not supported by newer versions of
gcc, which for examples bites OpenBSD really hard.

And I know some people still running really old stuff (like Irix
or OSF/1), though I don't know wether they're using ratpoison on
those machines ;-)

For arrays of unspecified length (mentioned in an earlier mail,
IIRC): I think something like

        struct foo {
                int bar;
                char baz[];
        };

can easily be replaced by

        struct foo {
                int bar;
                char baz[0];
        };

without semantic changes (i.e. sizeof (struct foo) is the same for
both variants).

Ciao,
        Kili