From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 19568 invoked by alias); 4 Jan 2003 22:13:09 -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 19559 invoked from network); 4 Jan 2003 22:13:09 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mcncgw.mariani.ws) (64.3.144.100) by 209.249.29.67 with SMTP; 4 Jan 2003 22:13:09 -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 h04MHRu11617; Sat, 4 Jan 2003 22:17:27 GMT Message-ID: <3E175C67.4050605@chaincast.com> Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2003 22:36:00 -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: <20030104205839.01F99F2D52@nile.gnat.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2003-01/txt/msg00171.txt.bz2 Robert Dewar wrote: >>I argue that it is not trivially fixable. In the case of a third party >>library, it is virtually impossible to guarentee that introducing a new >>member will not break any clients of the library. >> >> > >It may certainly break any clients who use the WITH feature, but that is >their choice. Anyone who uses WITH on a 3rd party library is accepting >that updates to the library that add names may possibly cause some >illegalities, just as someone using USE in Ada takes this "risk". >But the user of the library knows immediately that the problem has >arisen and can fix it trivially. > > I beg to differ. Maintaing source compatability where possible with new library versions (without having to mess with clients) is an important aspect of interfaces. Any language construct that fails in this regard (like with) is very bad - period. Again, our perspectives on what is important is different, as a library maintainer, I see this as much more important an issue than you do.