[Gllug] How can writing a single character (successfully) to

Nix nix at esperi.org.uk
Wed Oct 25 21:48:50 UTC 2006


On 25 Oct 2006, Richard Jones told this:

> On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 10:06:16PM +0100, Nix wrote:
>> On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, t. clarke stipulated:
>> >              Might be interesting to compile the program with
>> > -fwritable-strings and see whether it still does the same thing!
>> 
>> Aside: this option no longer exists in recent versions of GCC.
>
> ... Screwing over lots of people with large legacy codebases which
> relied on this option.

We're not taking away their old GCCs!

--- in fact, -traditional was deprecated in GCC 3.1 and removed in 3.3:
3.4 no longer ships <varargs.h> either, nor can it be built with K&R
compilers.

There have been *no* complaints on the gcc-help or gcc lists about it,
so I think we can assume that this option was about as used as the
CFront compatibility options or -fvtable-gc (which broke in GCC 3.0 and
nobody noticed until 3.4...)

The compiler hackers were happy because it meant they didn't have to
keep GCC bootstrapping with the awful HP-UX bundled C compiler anymore
(pretty much the only K&R C compiler anyone has tried to build GCC with
for about the last, oh, ten years). Note that -traditional support is
still present in the preprocessor: imake relies on it. Hopefully imake
will finally *die* now X is no longer using it and -traditional can be
vaped from there as well...

... in, say, another ten years or so.

-- 
`When we are born we have plenty of Hydrogen but as we age our
 Hydrogen pool becomes depleted.'
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