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Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 10:06:33 -0700
From: Richard Maine <Richard.Maine@nasa.gov>
To: sc22wg5@dkuug.dk
Subject: Re: (j3.2004) (SC22WG5.3108) Future of coco
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I hope you didn't expect people to have time to give these questions any
serious thought between now and the meeting.  I sure don't.  :-(  Some
of the Europeans might plausibly have already left.

Just one comment off the top of my head.  I didn't have to spend time
thinking about this one because it is an old knee-jerk of mine.

--On Thursday, April 29, 2004 9:13 AM -0400 Dan Nagle <dnagle@erols.com>
wrote:

> Should the symbol control mechanisms (ifdef, ifndef, undefine)
> be supported?

I vehemently oppose going down that direction.  If that's what we wanted,
we'd have been better off to just standardize a "Fortran-safe" version
of cpp - something along the lines of fpp.  My bad experiences with the
error-prone nature of cpp/fpp were the main motivator behind my early
support for coco.  If we are going to have coco repeat all the same mistakes
as cpp, then I retroactively withdraw my support.  :-(

In particular, the ifdef stuff is *SEVERELY* prone to undetected typos or
similar errors. Put a typo in either the definition or the ifdef and they
are still both perfectly legal, but don't do what you intended - happens
all the time in cpp, at least to me.

We've got the equivalent of "implicit none" by default in coco (Don't
we?  I'll confess that I don't keep up on it very well.)  That
saves us from a large class of typos, but it would be pretty much
defeated by ifdef and friends.

-- 
Richard Maine                |  Good judgment comes from experience;
Richard.Maine@nasa.gov       |  experience comes from bad judgment.
                             |        -- Mark Twain

