Re: Results of survey re. a new array size operator

James Kuyper <jameskuyper@alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:

On 1/24/25 01:57, Alexis wrote:

 
Hi all,
 
JeanHeyd Meneide, a Project Editor for WG14, has just posted the results
of a survey re. the preferred form of a new array size operator:
 
"There is a clear preference for a lowercase keyword, here, though it is
not by the biggest margin. One would imagine that with the way we keep
standardizing things since C89 (starting with _Keyword and then adding a
header with a macro) that C folks would be overwhelmingly in favor of
simply continuing that style. The graph here, however, tells a different
story: while there’s a large contingency that clearly hates having
_Keyword by itself, it’s not the _Keyword + stdkeyword.h macro that
comes out on top! It’s just having a plain lowercase keyword, instead."

 
One of the most important goals of the C standard is backwards
compatibility. A lower case keyword would break any program that was
already using that keyword as a user-defined identifier.

Lower case _reserved word_ would break compatibility.  But in most
cases there is no need to reserve a keyword: simply treat it as
predefined identifier with magic meaning.  I user want gives it
different meaning, the new meaning would be used instead of
predefiend one.

Of course implementation could offer more choices, like removing
predefined meaning of specific indentifier (but allowing use of
rest of new stuff), warning about use as identifier, etc.

Standard could possibly add a pragma to disable specific predefined
identifiers or reserved words.

--
                              Waldek Hebisch