2 ms·

And you don't see any problem with extensions being prohibited?

• yiyus 7y ago
  No, I don't. I think that extensions are extensions which by definition are not part of the standard. Compilers should allow extensions, but the standard does not necessarily have to. I do not say it should be done this way, but it is perfectly possible to define a strict standard and leave extensions out of it.
  • sandov 7y ago
    That makes sense.
  • eru 7y ago
    And that's what's happening in practice for some features. GCC has a ton of options, and only a few of the myriad combinations give you a compiler that behaves strictly according to one of the C standards. And that's just fine. In fact, compiler vendors experimenting, even in ways that are not allowed by the standard, is one of the main avenues to come up with new ideas for how to evolve the standard. In fact, minor variations on semantics that are not allowed under the standard are probably more in spirit with C, than eg feeding the whole source file to a Python interpreter, if there's any string literal anywhere in the file that's not closed on the same line. The former violates the standard, the latter complies.