Re: Patch to allow compilation with old compilers (VS 2008)

[Akim Demaille]

Hi Simon,

> Le 18 sept. 2018 à 16:34, Simon Sobisch <address@hidden> a écrit :
> 
>   VS 2008 is one of the "old" compilers that only allow declarations
>   directly on the start of a block.
>   Different sources found in bison 3.1 were obviously adjusted for this
>   already, the attached patch fixes the missing parts.
> 
>   The code was verified to raise no new warnings during compilation and
>   to pass the testsuite on GNU/Linux with GCC 4.1.2.
>   Other tests including valgrind were not run.
> 
>   Regards,
>   Simon
> 
>   Note: I've also attached a patch for "lib/stat.c" and "lib/stat-w32.c"
>   which is included in the bison distribtion but isn't part of the bison
>   project. It was also sent to its original author to be possibly
>   included « upstream".

This is embarrassing: we _finally_ decided to go forward and
drop versions of C predating C99.  I’m not referring to C11
or some super modern version of C, I’m referring to a version
of the language which is almost 20 years old.

Your patch is basically just a revert of several of my patches.
We are both wasting our time here.

Are you serious: VS2008, which was released almost ten years
after C99, does not support this basic feature of C99?  There’s
no way to ask for C99 support?

Note that this evolution is only in the sources of Bison itself,
not of the generated parsers: they still only need C90.  Bison
is a maintainer tool, it is not to be run on users’ machines, so
we expect to have more modern tools.