From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Richard Stallman To: Gabriel.Dos_Reis@sophia.inria.fr Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org Subject: Re: type based aliasing again Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 18:02:00 -0000 Message-ID: <199909180527.BAA21196@psilocin.gnu.org> References: <00d301bf003f$5f862630$545a9090@uito-nt-server.duma.gov.ru> <199909170626.CAA20026@psilocin.gnu.org> X-SW-Source: 1999-09n/msg00774.html Message-ID: <19990930180200.DQ0veU9yCSyjKQ1_FaGY5F_e_1Z56dkggYgcFE3tDgw@z> And when those invalid programs will break, Not when--if. It is possible for some of these programs to break again, but we can confidently expect that most of them will not break again. This is an example of the sort of exaggeration that I have encountered over and over again in arguments for harshness. It is not a good thing for GCC maintenance decisions to be based on exaggerations like this. we'll find the same persons arguing that GCC used to support those porgrams and should continue to do the right thing it used to. Most of these cases will never again break, but some may. If and when that happens, we could well find SOME of the same people complaining who complained about the same case before. However, if the case that fails is in an April 1999 version of a program, and if the December 1999 version has different code because a warning advised the programmer to fix it, and if the case actually breaks in 2001, then the programmer will not complain. And most of the users who compile that package will use a more recent version, so they will not complain either. Thus, we will get only a fraction of the number of complaints we will get now. Would people please stop making arguments which exaggerate to the worst case?