Re: Proposal: standardize browser specific CSS include

Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
> Each C/C++ compiler has its own vendor/version identifier. No one known 
> compiler is pretending to be another one.

The Intel C++ Compiler, when on Windows, pretends to be Microsoft Visual 
C++. It defines the _MSC_VER macro, and has command-line switches to 
emulate the bugs/behaviour of VC++ 6.0/7.0/7.1/8.0. It has to do that so 
that existing VC++ programs can be ported to ICC easily.

The same compiler on Linux pretends to be GCC by defining __GNUC__, for 
the same reasons. It has to implement lots of GCC-specific extensions to 
C++, in order to be useful in a world where many programs rely on those 
non-standard features.

That sounds like quite a pain for Intel and for anyone else who wants to 
write a compiler, so it may not be the best model to emulate. It helps 
authors in the short term since they can write GCC-specific code and 
MSVC-specific code and get the right behaviour on each compiler, but it 
hurts compiler developers in the longer term since they can't implement 
pure standard C++ without breaking lots of existing code.

-- 
Philip Taylor
pjt47@cam.ac.uk

Received on Friday, 2 November 2007 00:58:22 UTC