Messages in this thread | | | From | "David Schwartz" <> | Subject | RE: C++ pushback | Date | Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:25:19 -0700 |
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> > As for remembering new names, that's a load of complete crap and I > > find it hard to believe that you're raising the argument for honest > > reasons.
> The scale of the kernel, the number and churn of developers, and the > importance of not breaking things in a stable kernel tend to argue > against you. Humans develop the kernel. Humans remember names well. > You may think that's arbitrary, but when you change naming across the > entire kernel, you confuse a very large and diverse group of people who > do this because they enjoy it. It's hard enough when this has to happen > for useful or necessary reasons; you're asking the kernel developers to > accept it for a completely arbitrary whim that they have rejected > successfully several times in the past.
C++ has how many additional reserved words? I believe the list is delete, friend, private, protected, public, template, throw, try, and catch. Renaming every symbol that currently has a name from this list to the corresponding name with a trailing underscore is an easily understood consistent change.
That you would argue against is with things like "not breaking things" is a load of complete crap.
> You want C++? Fork the freely > available source code at a convenient point and convert it yourself. As > long as it stays GPL, you're perfectly within your rights so to do. > Hobson's choice is yours. Belaboring this point is silly.
Making ridiculous arguments like that a consistent change of a small set of names is "breaking things in a stable kernel" is silly.
And, FWIW, it isn't even necessary to change those names. That is only needed to compile the kernel in C++, which is not what anyone was talking about. Supporting C++ modules, for example, would work fine even if the kernel had variables called 'class' or 'private'. (Though things could be done a lot more cleanly if it didn't as it would require some remapping before and after compilation.)
DS
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