What's up with gcc?

[Andy Green]

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Konstantin 'Ksee' Dmitryev (Zelgadis) wrote:

| Ohh... Well...
| Maybe, but for a such lame user as me, it is not funny every time when
I want to compile new program read and edit the sources. :(

Complain to the original programmer about his mistakes, ask him to issue
a fixed source tree...

| Why I even can't compile older versions of gcc? They not comply
standarts too?

If your compile tools are not keeping you honest, by telling you about
every kind of bad thing you do[1], it is easy to do bad things when the
phone rings and you have to resume with an empty brain, your teenage kid
has performed a new outrage or you have a bad day.  The GCC folks are
mortals the same as the rest of us, in fact they probably get the ideas
for new compiler tests from looking at crazy stuff they did in their own
code, since that is the code they spend the most time with.

You can probably still get some GCC 2.96 version from somewhere on the
net and go with that.  But it is letting bad things in the code go
without an error!  The only way forward is to accept the new warnings
and errors from the improved compiler, fix the broken code -- because
that's what it actually is -- and wait for the next compiler version to
shake out even more stupidness from your code.  That way the compilers
get better, the code you want to use gets better, the programmer learns
new habits to avoid trouble...

- -Andy

[1] Which is why one should ideally use -Wall -WError to get all the
warnings the compiler knows how to look for and to make them into fatal
errors so you cannot be lazy
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