So I understand from what I've read in various places that Rockbox
endeavors to comply with a pre-C99 C standard (C89, I guess, since we
don't use KNR-style function definitions). My question is, why? I
think someone mentioned that it's so that people with older compilers
can still compile Rockbox, but would it be so horrible to require a
compiler that's less than ten years old? Who is this serving, and
isn't it quite a hindrance to most of us? For instance, C99 would let
people use EOL comments and has a more well-defined behavior for the
modulo operator when dealing with negative numbers -- and those are
just a couple things I've encountered since I started working with
Rockbox.

While we're on the subject, I've been programming in C since 1992 and
I've never encountered a compiler that couldn't handle EOL comments.

Can anyone elaborate generally on why we stick with C89, and more
specifically why EOL comments aren't allowed?

-David
Received on 2009-08-06