From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 12444 invoked by alias); 4 Jan 2003 17:59:16 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: Sender: gcc-owner@gcc.gnu.org Received: (qmail 12437 invoked from network); 4 Jan 2003 17:59:15 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mcncgw.mariani.ws) (64.3.144.100) by 209.249.29.67 with SMTP; 4 Jan 2003 17:59:15 -0000 Received: from chaincast.com (IDENT:gianni@bulli.mariani.ws [216.98.238.112]) by mcncgw.mariani.ws (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h04I3Zu09598; Sat, 4 Jan 2003 18:03:35 GMT Message-ID: <3E1720E6.5070902@chaincast.com> Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2003 17:59:00 -0000 From: Gianni Mariani Reply-To: gmariani@chaincast.com Organization: Chaincast, Inc User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020910 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Robert Dewar CC: gcc@gcc.gnu.org Subject: Re: c++ "with" keyword References: <20030104173536.3331FF2DFD@nile.gnat.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2003-01/txt/msg00148.txt.bz2 Robert Dewar wrote: >>Someone innocently added a new member and completly changed the >>behaviour of the code. For code maintainability, I'd suggest that this >>would cause more difficult to discover problems than would be merited. >> >> > >This is a red herring. Any reasonable definition of the with feature would >make it impossible for the addition of a member name to change the meaning >of existing code (yes, it might make it illegal, but that's reaosnable). > > I think you missed the point. The fact that this can happen - even if you make it illegal, means more maintenance. Using it from libraries also means that simply adding a member to a library could cause untold number of users to that library have compilation errors. Besides, this was a "real" problem with a Pascal program I wrote many 20 years ago and why I never used the 'with' keyword since.