https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=71885
--- Comment #20 from Jonathan Wakely <redi at gcc dot gnu.org> --- (In reply to Kern Sibbald from comment #17) > It is pretty difficult to argue with the developers because they know the > "rules", better than most programmers. However, here in my opinion they > used very poor judgement, by implementing a change that they were fully > aware would break many programs (they documented it as such). You've got the timeline wrong. The documentation was written *after* the feature was implemented. The new version of GCC had been used to build and test lots of code, which revealed that there were a number of programs breaking the rules of the C++ language, so the documentation was added. > The g++ developers could have realized that in especially in "undefined" > territory where they knew they would break code the conservative way to do > it without creating chaos is to add new strict warning message for a period > of time (one to two years) prior to making their changes default. That's been tried before. Nobody fixes the code until the default changes, so in practice your suggestion achieves nothing except postponing the problems by one or two years.
