Re: type based aliasing again

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    So we can conclude that the expense (time and effort) needed to
    address this *one* issue is:

      -  representative of what we're likely to expend over similar issues
	 that *will* arise

If subsequent issues are like this one, finding a way to improve the
situatin will be fairly easy, but persuading certain people to accept
an improvement may be difficult.

But if people accept the principle of making small and easy efforts to
keep old code working, subsequent issues will only involve the
comparatively easy job of figuring out how to do that.

In effect, your argument is that this proposal is a bad idea because
Craig Burley and others will spend time arguing against it.  I do not
think that the proposal can be held responsible for that ;-).

    So people can either fix their code now, or fix it later.

I notice a pattern that people arguing against concern for the users
tend to exaggerate the situation in this particular way: they change
"some of this code may break, may need to be changed" into "all of
this code will break, will need to be changed."

    having) to accommodate Merced or McKinley amounts to entertaining
    the same hopes, and therefore similar scaling of costs, as the
    Y2K problem.

Compilers did not give warnings for Y2K problems, but we will
make GCC give a warning for most of these problems.  So these situations
are hardly similar.