Re: bison'd files don't compile under Microsoft VC++

[Hans Aberg]

At 09:16 -0500 2002/02/14, Florian Krohm wrote:
>I agree with Akim and Paul, that this was an experiment that failed
>and the patches should be reverted. The real problem here is
>that one tries to compile C as C++. That is a not such a great idea
>because the languages have different semantics in fundamental concepts
>such as assignments.

It was evidently a failed experiment to them because they somehow believed
that they would be able to catch that semantic issue.

I never believed that: I thought we were only dealing with namespace and
headers issue, which does not have anything to do with the classes with
non-trivial constructors issue.

>The fact that Bison parsers used to work with C++ in the past is
>more by accident than by design.

It was actually by design, ...

> Proper behavior in C++ context was
>never guaranteed nor targeted.

... but not guranteed.

> IMHO it is unreasonable to ask the Bison
>developers to fix something that is not really their problem.

It was evidently their problem, because these developers on the one hand
put off the genuine C++ issue off indefinitely for a long period of time
(several years), while on the same time compiling the C parser as C++ in
their own projects. Then one day, their own C++ projects started to break,
because they got hold of a C++ compiler that checked the C++ code properly,
catching errors in the earlier dirty compile C as C++ code.

But this does not have anything to do with the namespace and C++ header
issue to do.

  Hans Aberg