Re: [DotGNU]Dotgnu written in C#?

[DrDiettrich]

Fergus Henderson wrote:
> Here's what the autotools book <http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/> says:
<snip>

Thanks for your very interesting information.

> What happens if the software needs to do something which neither the IDE
> nor the user know how to do?

Can you please give me any single concrete example of such a situation?

A program, as source code, can require certain information about it's
runtime environment, and it can request certain services from that
environment. The only requirement is the availability of the services,
which provide the information or perform specific tasks. All that is a
matter of libraries, which may need a platform specific implementation.
In no case it's a matter of the build process of any program.

> How would you deal with e.g. checking whether the C compiler has a bug that
> prevents the simultaneous use of structure assignment and global register
> variables?  Is this IDE supposed to somehow know in advance about every
> such possible compiler bug that packages will need to work around?
> Neither the user nor the IDE are going to know anything about such problems.
> Feature tests are a much better way of dealing with issues like this.

This just is the reason for second source tools, which allow to
determine errors in the program code, as well as in all tools which are
requierd to build a program.

In detail a program should never ever care about compiler bugs. Every
attempt to cure such an bug in application code may fail in a slightly
different environment. Likewise a program should not rely on special
non-standard compiler features. Such procedures may be appreciated by
hackers, but not by software engineers. Everything can be done in the
standardized way, and any deviation from the standards is dangerous to
the user of such a program. Every programmer can hack the code for his
private use as he just likes, but code for continued development by
other programmers, and for use by other people, should comply with
accepted and approved standards.

DoDi