Re: Deprecating --enable-bounds-check?

[John W. Eaton]

On 05/11/2017 11:10 AM, Rik wrote:
> 5/10/17
>
> jwe,
>
> What do you think about deprecating and eventually removing
> --enable-bounds-check?

It seems reasonable to me.  We could make xelem, elem, and () all do the 
same thing, and deprecate xelem (and possibly elem, or is there an 
advantage to having both operator and member function forms?).

Way back when, there were no tools like valgrind or the address 
sanitizer options for GCC (and no Clang at all).  So I thought it made 
sense to add bounds checking as an option for the classes, even if it 
couldn't catch everything.  You are right that now those tools are much 
better than the bounds checking we have, so we might as well just use 
them instead of trying to do a halfway job of it in the code.

Do we really need to deprecate the option?  I guess we could keep the 
option but have it do nothing except print a message for a few releases. 
 But I don't see any point in keeping the functionality at this point.

I'd also say that we should just standardize on using operator () 
instead of the elem method as well.

Do you want to work on these changes or should I?

jwe