Re: dfa.c fix for C89 compilers

[Jim Meyering]

Reuben Thomas wrote:
> On 31 March 2010 18:04, Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On 03/31/2010 05:19 PM, Reuben Thomas wrote:
>>>
>>> The point about C89's age is
>>> irrelevant; what is important is how well and widely C99 is
>>> implemented, which, to put it mildly, depends on your perspective.
>>> (Even GCC doesn't fully implement it, though thankfully the holes are
>>> now pretty small and esoteric.) Making a program require C99,
>>> therefore, relegates it to mainstream, modern systems.
>>
>> For this particular feature, the "flag date" is June 18, 2001 (when GCC 3.0
>> was released).  It's still almost 9 years old.
>>
>> Are there any serious porting targets that do not support GCC 3.0?
>
> Nelson Beebe seems to think so: his builds of GNU Zile for me included
> many platform/compiler combinations that only supported C89.

Nelson is providing a very useful service in general, but those
c89-(without decl-after-stmt) compilers constitute a computer museum.
On most (all?) of the systems for which he has vendor-provided c89
compilers, gcc-3 is also available.

IMHO, a good indicator that a particular system is *not* a
reasonable portability target is when fewer than two independent
users care enough about it to report build failures.

> I certainly haven't used a system that is a "serious porting target"
> that doesn't support GCC 3.0 for many years, but my experience is
> limited.