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Subject: Re: C99 and EOL comments

Re: C99 and EOL comments

From: Nils <deathtoallhumans_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2009 19:18:38 +0200

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 6:10 PM, David Johnston<david_at_pinkandaint.com> wrote:
> 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
>

Hi, if you by "EOL comments" mean the // style comments I am pretty
sure there is no technical reason that we don't want them it is just
the code style decided for rockbox code. As for using C99 features I
am not sure what other devs think of them but we are generally
supporting only a single version of gcc for each target so support for
older compilers is likely not an issue.
Received on 2009-08-06

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