Am Montag, den 20.09.2021, 19:47 +0300 schrieb Ville Voutilainen via Liaison:
> On Mon, 20 Sept 2021 at 19:37, Ryan McDougall via SG21
> <sg21_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > Can you help me understand the concern here -- is it that C will have to update its grammar to
> > recognize this syntax as not ignorable, and they would rather not?
>
> I can't speak for Aaron's concerns, but based on his excellent
> explanation, I have mine, which I'd wager are mighty similar to his:
>
> 1) our design goal for the syntax is that it's sufficiently
> incompatible so that older compilers don't just half-accidentally
> ignore-chomp it.
> 2) we're failing to meet that design goal, because an older C-compiler
> can ignore-chomp it and diagnose it
> as "attribute ignored". The syntax is not sufficiently different for a
> conforming older C-compiler not to mistreat
> it, and we fail to achieve the goal of a compiler syntax-checking the
> contract annotation.
> 3) in other words, the C compiler took our program, and treated it in
> a conforming way, it diagnosed a syntax
> error with a very misleading diagnostic, but was fully-conforming all the way.

Is this somehow different to old C++ compilers?

Martin

> Fixing a newer C standard to require that there's additional checks
> doesn't fix this problem. The older compilers
> can still chomp+diagnose the new syntax in a manner that's conforming
> to the old rules, without performing
> the syntax-checking that we desperately want.