Re: making coreutils depend on c99

[Jim Meyering]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
> Jim Meyering <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Do any of you know of platforms for which that would not work?
>> I.e., for which there is a useful (or better, `essential') compiler
>> lacking such support?
>
> GCC 2.95.3 is still the C compiler for OpenBSD 3.6 (released November
...
> The main undergraduate-computing cluster I use, ugrad.cs.ucla.edu, is
...

Thanks for the data points.
I feel strongly enough about this that I'll go ahead nonetheless.
I expect to provide a patch to convert the initially-few
uses of c99-specific constructs to equivalent c89 ones.
The manual steps required to build with a pre-c99 compiler
will encourage stragglers to obtain/provide a more modern compiler.

>> I don't know of an automatic c99-to-c89 translator...
>
> If it's just declarations-after-statements, and it's all your own code
> so that you can assume your own indenting style, then perhaps you
> could write a simple translator of your own.  That's how L. Peter

I want *less* work :-)