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Re: RFC: FSF GCC, #import (and #pragma once)
From: |
Adam Fedor |
Subject: |
Re: RFC: FSF GCC, #import (and #pragma once) |
Date: |
Fri, 7 Mar 2003 11:19:54 -0700 |
On Friday, March 7, 2003, at 03:17 AM, David Ayers wrote:
But these don't seems like a prominent deprecationby Apple. The
former seems like a advisory for dedicated implementation languages,
yet ignores ObjC++, while the later is a release note bullet under the
title of "Changes in Warnings". They are more weak acknowledgements
that they recognize the issues. And most important of all, because
they have not guarded their headers against multipleinclusion and
continue to use #import within their headers themselves, it remains an
academic discussion in relation to existing code base. Do you, or
anyone else, have a reference to a more prominentstatement?
I wish Apple was clearer on their intentions also. I have no idea what
they plan to do.
In my view, before the FSF should consider removing the support for
#import, Apple must guard their headers, (probably stop using #import
themselves), prominently deprecatethe usage, and maybe even remove it
from their version of GCC. And even then, if FSF GCC still supported
the (then old) Apple semantics of #import, the FSF might still
consider continuing the support for a while just in case this might
spur some projects to switch to GNUstep. (I do recognize that in the
real world Apple will most certainly not remove the feature as long as
FSF GCC has it.)
I believe the technical implications, of whether this or that
implementation is correct or not, is secondary to that fact that the
FSF GCC should encourage the use of free software by implementing a
widely used feature. And this alone should cause the FSF to embrace
the work of anyone syncing FSF's and Apple's semantics, no matter how
broken Apple's semantics might be. This of course only applies to
features that the FSF discourages anyway and are merely provided for
compatibility, as is the case here. And I have no problem if this
potentially broken feature were turned off by default and must be
enabled explicitly..
This sounds like a good idea to me. Although the FSF cannot make
decisions based on what Apple may or may not do. Keeping the option of
using #import even if it is normally turned off would be a good idea.