Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> I know the proposals did not dig into all the corner cases -- and I
> don't even know whether they considered the case. But, at some point,
> someone has to go through the sheer number of proposals and try to
> paint a global picture and see how they interact with existing
> implementation techniques; C++ is not known to be orthogonal :-)
Oh, we dug through that proposal quite thoroughly
I specifically brought up the case of diagnosing recursion and making
it malformed. The consensus was that while it was clearly a
programming error to write recursive ctors, no-one wanted to diagnose
recursive chains of calls, especially with all the other wonders we can
throw in to make 'indirect' recursion hard to detect.
It would be nice if there was a sop in there so that well-meaning
implementations could choose-but-not-be-required-to declare the easily
diagnosed cases malformed, but I don't think that got any support
either, as no-one was aware of anyone wanting to do this.
The point I forgot to make though, is that any program using recursive
constructors is broken, so I don't know how much it is worth worrying
about g++ implementation details for broken programs - it might be best
to just ignore the issue (so long as it does not produce new
compile/link time errors, and I don't think that is the case here)
AlisdairM
