[comp.std.c] #Pragma K&R

gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (01/16/90)

In article <KHB.90Jan15210156@chiba.kbierman@sun.com> khb@chiba.kbierman@sun.com (Keith Bierman - SPD Advanced Languages) writes:
>I would have thought that something like
>#pragma K&R
>would be highly desired, for those cases where the traditional unix
>interpretation of K&R has been different .....

What makes you think that "the traditional interpretation" had ever
been well defined?  If it had been, we would have had considerably
less work to do to prepare the C Standard.

#pragma K&R would be essentially a contradiction, since few K&R1
compilers would accept source code containing that preprocessor
directive.  Thus some other approach to backward compatibility
would be much better.

AT&T is providing backward compatibility in UNIX System V Release 4.0
via options to the "cc" command.  GNU's "gcc" takes a similar approach.
Some vendors have simply provided totally separate compilers, with the
ANSI C version newly engineered and their older one basically unchanged.