Re: GNU coding standards

[Richard Stallman]

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I think that invalidating formerly standard language constructs is
foolish.  Making old, valid, working programs rot is causing
gratuitous churn.  Being able to run an old program without studying
it to fix rot is one of the advantages of free software.

A new version of program A, that works correctly with the current
program version of B, ought to work with an old version of B when that
is not fundamentally hard.

For C function definitions, we were able to achieve this by writing
the function definitions using the K&R syntax, and using declarations
to specify the functions' prototypes.

But since compiuler developers are going down the path of breaking
programs that have K&R function definitions, I think there will be a
smaller amount of this annoying incompatibility if we convert programs
to write function definitions in ANSI C syntax.  Even though it means
making our programs LESS portable, it seems they have made that
necessary.

Would someone like to write a draft change to standards.texi?




-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)