RE: Agree: Require ANSI C for development [Was: libwww ]

OK, If its beat up on ARGSx and PARAMS time...


For Shen I first thought `yuk!' then I had second thoughts `yuk!'.

Then I wrote a C preprocessor that takes ANSI C and produces the ARGS
stuff and HTML headers and a few other bits. I'm a big fan of having
the headers generated from the C source. This means that headers for
structures are kept separately - but  I always do this anyway because I
use data models such as Gvdel to build C strutures etc from a more
abstract form, allow attachment of metadata etc etc...

On the MALLOC side. Can we do the job properly? Like have macros where the
TYPE of the malloced item is declared:-

bytes = MALLOC (char, 32)

Or better

STATUS = MALLOC (char, 32, &bytes)

This means that you can have metadata attachments which then means that 
hypertext coredumps can be produced... dead kool...


I agree with Dan on the forcing WINDOZE to be proper... I always use the
macros BEGIN and END in my proceedures to force handling of status info
transparently. So if I'm on VMS I can get proper VMS error codes and if I'm on 
UNIX they look well yukky. But you can then play games with the END 
macro... Stick some sort of label in and a return then becomes a jump to the
label and return... Can force a lot of cleanups that way.... 


I also use macros to assert PRE and POST conditions....

PRE (WWW_an_error_code, x!=NULL);
PRE ....

>Not only should we require an ANSI C compiler for development, but we
>should write squeaky-clean ANSI C code, except for modules that need
>POSIX features, in which case we should write squeaky-clean POSIX code.

I don't like using gcc for development for this very reason.. I get many more 
error messages from the DEC-C compiler on VMS...



Phill

Received on Wednesday, 13 July 1994 21:18:01 UTC