Re: RFC: FSF GCC, #import (and #pragma once)

[Adam Fedor]

On Friday, March 7, 2003, at 03:17 AM, David Ayers wrote:
> But these don't seems like a prominent deprecationby Apple.  The 
> former seems like a advisory for dedicated implementation languages, 
> yet ignores ObjC++, while the later is a release note bullet under the 
> title of "Changes in Warnings".  They are more weak acknowledgements 
> that they recognize the issues.  And most important of all, because 
> they have not guarded their headers against multipleinclusion and 
> continue to use #import within their headers themselves, it remains an 
> academic discussion in relation to existing code base.  Do you, or 
> anyone else, have a reference to a more prominentstatement?

I wish Apple was clearer on their intentions also. I have no idea what 
they plan to do.


> In my view, before the FSF should consider removing the support for 
> #import, Apple must guard their headers, (probably stop using #import 
> themselves), prominently deprecatethe usage, and maybe even remove it 
> from their version of GCC.  And even then, if FSF GCC still supported 
> the (then old) Apple semantics of #import, the FSF might still 
> consider  continuing the support for a while just in case this might 
> spur some projects to switch to GNUstep.  (I do recognize that in the 
> real world Apple will most certainly not remove the feature as long as 
> FSF GCC has it.)
>
> I believe the technical implications, of whether this or that 
> implementation is correct or not, is secondary to that fact that the 
> FSF GCC should encourage the use of free software by implementing a 
> widely used feature.  And this alone should cause the FSF to embrace 
> the work of anyone syncing FSF's and  Apple's semantics, no matter how 
> broken Apple's semantics might be.  This of course only applies to 
> features that the FSF discourages anyway and are merely provided for 
> compatibility, as is the case here.  And I have no problem if this 
> potentially broken feature were turned off by default and must be 
> enabled explicitly..

This sounds like a good idea to me. Although the FSF cannot make 
decisions based on what Apple may or may not do. Keeping the option of 
using #import even if it is normally turned off would be a good idea.