From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 2489 invoked by alias); 15 Apr 2008 10:37:33 -0000 Received: (qmail 2473 invoked by uid 22791); 15 Apr 2008 10:37:31 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from mail.network-theory.co.uk (HELO mail.network-theory.co.uk) (66.199.228.187) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with ESMTP; Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:37:14 +0000 Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:37:00 -0000 Message-ID: <87zlrvh0a1.wl%bjg@network-theory.co.uk> From: Brian Gough To: gsl-discuss@sourceware.org, Hongzheng Wang , help-gsl@gnu.org Subject: Re: [Help-gsl] GSL and C99 standard In-Reply-To: <20080411124025.GC24451@jolt.modeemi.cs.tut.fi> References: <87wsn5irwq.wl%bjg@network-theory.co.uk> <20080411124025.GC24451@jolt.modeemi.cs.tut.fi> User-Agent: Wanderlust/2.14.0 (Africa) Emacs/22.1 Mule/5.0 (SAKAKI) MIME-Version: 1.0 (generated by SEMI 1.14.6 - "Maruoka") Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Message-Mac: 1d592c7b0df0925875c07531de709482 Mailing-List: contact gsl-discuss-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gsl-discuss-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2008-q2/txt/msg00020.txt.bz2 At Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:40:25 +0300, Heikki Orsila wrote: > Are there many users that can not support any C99 features? One area I know of: it is a problem for embedded systems, when compilers aren't updated by the manufacturer. That's something I want to support. > I think the the relevant question is which C99 features, not the whole > feature set. For example, I would like to use named initializers for > structures as they make code more maintainable and easier to read: > gcc has supported this feature for ages already.. For code internal to the library I think we would stick with C89 compatible syntax. It makes sense to use C99 functions internally where it's possible to do that without breaking C89 compatibility, by providing portable versions as a fallback. We've done some of that with functions like isfinite(), but there are other cases that could be changed. It is mainly a question of how C99 could benefit users. The main areas would be - native complex numbers - restricted pointers for optimisation - new IEEE floating point functions/exception handling -- Brian Gough