[Geany-Devel] Lets move to C99

[Colomban Wendling]

Le 16/08/2013 22:09, Matthew Brush a écrit :
> [...]
> 
> Not meant as a rant against G*,

Sorry then, I read the final sentences as such, sorry.

> when it was started (~1998 IIRC), there
> was a reason for wrapping all the (then) non-standard stuff for
> portability. But now, it just makes it harder for people to contribute
> code since many are used to using standard C (or more likely C++) and
> have to double check everything to make sure that nothing post 1989 was
> used unless it has a g in front of it.

You're dreaming, I 99.99999% sure *nobody* does it, and if we don't have
to change much is only because there aren't much use of the things C99
adds.  And at worse it's only adding "g_" in front, it doesn't really
mangle the name.

>>> P.S. Sorry for the bikeshed bait.
>>
>> Yeah, and sorry to sound so annoying (especially in the other mail ;),
>> but I really see this as "let's upgrade for the sake of upgrading", and
>> I don't see the point.  And this annoys me when you try to justify it by
>> ranting against G* -- not that I care about the rant, but because it's a
>> false justification.
>>
> 
> Although I often do rant against G*, I didn't do that here at all, I
> don't think. My point is why does everyone (core devs and especially
> other drive-by contributors) have to use rules from before you were born
> (or so), just for the sake of you being able to stick -pedantic -std=c89
> on your compiler command line? It seems so arbitrary.

A: Why not?  Or, so we don't get mixed declaration and code, it just
doesn't build with -std=c89 :)

Although I'm not fan of the idea, I wouldn't bikeshed against it if
there was a reason *to* do so.  The only one I see in your mail is
"Allowed to declare loop counter-style variable inside the for loop",
and I don't find it worth even updating HACKING.

> Even if it was only for // comments, what's the argument for *NOT*
> starting to use a well-established ISO standard that's already one full
> iteration behind the current standard? Sure we might only use 4 or 5
> "new" language features in practice as opposed to the full list I
> pasted, but so what? Why not? What do we lose by doing this?

What do we get?

> BTW, what originally inspired me to send this message was that many many
> PRs have this comment attached to them: "no //-style comment, we use
> C89" (paraphrasing). IMO that's a crap reason for blocking a
> contribution or making someone (who used a perfectly standard C feature)
> add another commit, squash it into the previous ones and open a new pull
> request (or however it gets dealt with).

We cant change them ourselves, indeed.  But even if we started to use
C99 (why?), I'd still would like to keep our style -- which does include
"no C++-style comments" :)  Why?  Because I like it, because it'd be
consistent with the rest of the sources, and because it doesn't hurt.
Yesterday I said "no blank line at start of block": this has nothing to
do with the language, it's just useless and ugly.

> { .Cheers = "Matthew Brush" };

return "Cheers";