Re: [Plib-devel] PLIB developers needed.

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

Sam Stickland wrote:
>
> I believe the revised ANSI C++ scoping rules now forbid declaration of variables in a for statement, completely.  But this is fairly
> recent, so different compilers are still tolerating it in different ways.

*WHAT* ??!?

That's insane.
 
> The scoping for this sort of declaration was always cloudy at best, so it's probably for the best.

Not really.  In the first C++ spec, it said (quite clearly) that the scope was as
if you'd declared the variable immediately before the 'for' loop.  It was realised
by everyone that this was a bad decision - and Bjarne said so in the 'ARM' (Annotated
Reference Manual) - but he decided not to wreck all those existing programs by
changing the language to correct his error.

When ANSI first looked at the problem, they decided that it was better to have the
language "right" - even if that did cause some initial pain.  The pain was dealt
with by *everyone* except Microsoft...

And now you are telling me that they are *both* wrecking the language *and* pissing
off a million programmers?

Geeze.  That's a *terrible* decision.
 
> Bottom line - don't do it.

Well, that was always the bottom line for portable code...but I had hopes that
one day Microsoft would either *DIE* or fix their fscking compiler and we could
all get on with life.

Ack!

They should really have left the C++ spec as it was rather than keep tinkering
with it.  IMHO, just about everything that's happened to C++ since Bjarnes'
first implementation has been a BAD mistake.

-- 
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>
              WorkEmail: <sj...@li...>
              HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
              Projects : http://plib.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxkart.sourceforge.net
                         http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net