🚀 go-pugleaf

Steven Correll (sjc@netcom.com) wrote:
> Your argument is so persuasive that I withdraw my question and ask a
> different one: why the silly rule that a function must be declared
> before it can be invoked? If C++ were rid of that rule, it would be
> much easier to port legacy C code which has been partly converted to
> C++. Of course, such code will often crash in nigh-impossible-to-debug
> ways, but we wouldn't want a compiler to reject such code as
> ill-formed; this is a "quality of implementation" issue, or perhaps a
> job for a lint++ tool which could, by examining source files that are
> not normally compiled together, determine whether or not the compiler
> was right when it inferred the formal argument types based on the
> actual argument types.

> :-)

This would be more amusing if it weren't so well laced with half-plausible
misdirection, such as the amusing inversion of the role of function
declarations and lint.  I'm not sure I really want to defend the decision
about delete of an incomplete type, and I agree with Steve Clamage that
making it ill-defined is certainly the only other reasonable choice. 
Having had to deal with hybrid code that might have done this very thing -
I'm not really certain, and don't have the sources around to look over any
longer - I really do think it possible that there is code in use that
might be broken by that change. 

Not that I'm always wildly enthused about some of the things done for C 
(and early C++) compatability, but that's as much a part of C++ as are 
classes.
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