Hi Joseph > > .. the embedded C proposal as of 2008-01-18 is at stage 90.92. This > > suggests that it's very close to being incorporated into the standard. > > Have I understood that correctly? > > No. All it means is that TR 18037 is being revised, not anything to do > with the standard. This is a TR Type 2, not an IS, and remains a TR Type > 2, not an IS. [snip]
Thanks for the run-down on the standards process; very helpful! > A TR Type 2 may be considered as indicating "if you want a feature to > do this, it may be a good idea to do it this way and so gain > implementation experience for future standardization". As such, I > think it is reasonable > to continue to add features from such TRs to GCC, provided we > understand that they are experimental and may be changed incompatibly > in future to accord with future TR versions or changes in the course > of inclusion in the IS; that unlike actual language standards, we will > not try to provide > options to support different versions of a TR in the same compiler > version. (The same applies to informative annexes in an IS, which may > have the same sort of content as a Type 2 TR, such as Annex G in C99.) This (in addition to Mark's comments) sounds perfectly acceptable to me. We want the implementation to be standards compliant; if the standard one day changes the details, we will have to change to be compliant. Until then, the support should have a big neon sign over it that says "experimental". Cheers, Ben
