Were GNU C extensions proposed for the standard?

Walter Bright bright at Data-IO.COM
Thu Jan 25 08:36:55 AEST 1990


In article <IJ81DV3ggpc2 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
<< I believe the Committee thought (as I do) that extending the preprocessor in
<< that direction is a dead end, since inline functions provide a much cleaner
<< and more powerful way to do most of the same tasks.
<Is this really a reasonable argument, given that inline functions aren't in
<the standard?

Yes. Inline functions are a standard part of C++. Since Ansi C has already
borrowed a lot of features from C++ (prototyping, const), and the use and
implementation of inline functions is proven, there is no point to inventing
preprocessor kludges to do the same thing.

Since the ANSI standardization of C++ is under way, there is not much point
in a subsequent standard for C that is not C++.

It comes down to, if you want inline functions, use C++. It really ain't that
bad, and C++ compilers are more available than ANSI C compilers!



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