Re: Mostly Harmless: Welcoming our C++ friends

On Friday 05 December 2008 09:51:50 Kurt Harriman wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> > FYI, we have received patches morally equivalent to yours many times
> > over the years, and they have all been rejected. You might want to
> > review the archives about that.
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> I went back as far as 2005 in the archives, and found only this thread
> covering similar territory:
>
<snip>
> The foremost opposing argument seems to have been that there
> should be no attempt to alleviate the existing reserved word
> problem without automatic enforcement to guarantee that never
> in the future can new occurrences be introduced.
>
> But can we not separate the two problems of (1) actual identifiers
> which prevent C++ compilation today, vs. (2) hypothetical code which
> someone might submit in the future? The first problem is immediate;
> the second would only be troublesome if the hypothetical identifier
> makes it all the way through beta testing into a release.
>

Actually, given your configure changes, istm a buildfarm member compiling
with --enablecplusplus would prevent any such issue from getting to far.

<snip>
>
> PS. A few other threads had (at least somewhat) relevant discussion.
> They're listed below. I didn't find any other patches. I'd appreciate
> any links or pointers to any other threads which I should look at.
>

Might I suggest you collect all of these various arguments (both for and
against) and patches into a wiki page on the developers wiki?

Also, I've no real experience in masquerading c++ as c, but the main concern I
would have is possible imcompatabilities that might be introduced between
postgresql's compiled with c++ and those compiled in c. I'm not sure there
should be any, but maybe someone with more experience in this area might have
ideas on what to watch out for?

--
Robert Treat
Conjecture: http://www.xzilla.net
Consulting: http://www.omniti.com