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Re: [bug-gawk] fatal: cannot assign to arbitrary elements of SYMTAB
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From: |
Andrew J. Schorr |
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Subject: |
Re: [bug-gawk] fatal: cannot assign to arbitrary elements of SYMTAB |
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Date: |
Thu, 18 Apr 2019 10:58:56 -0400 |
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User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) |
On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 08:36:07AM -0500, Peng Yu wrote:
> Did you introduce the change and could revert it back? Otherwise, I don’t want
> to waste my time on this as I already showed the main points. In the nut
> shell,
> the changes should be have been backward compatible. If you were not sure
> whether a feature was good or not, you need to mark it as experimental. If a
> bad feature was not marked as experimental, at least you should give some
> warnings to let the features still work for a few years before eventually
> removing it. These are basic software engineering practices. It is
> disappointing that it was not followed.
It is not my change; it was Arnold's decision. The old behavior was essentially
a bug that was fixed, but I confess that I am somewhat sympathetic to your
point about breaking compatibility with existing code. Attached is an
unsupported patch to issue a warning message instead of aborting the program.
You can try using this if you need compatibility with old code. It should print
a warning message every time this deprecated legacy feature is used.
I highly recommend that you stop coding in that style. See my previous example
for a better solution.
Regards,
Andy
symtab.patch
Description: Text document