Breaking backwards compatiblity

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Fri Mar 9 21:54:28 PST 2012


On 3/9/2012 9:14 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 3/9/12 8:35 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 3/9/2012 3:14 PM, bearophile wrote:
>>> D will naturally progressively slow down the rhythm of its new breaking
>>> changes, but even very old languages introduce some breaking changes (see
>>> some of the changes in C++11),
>>
>> What breaking changes are there in C++11, other than dumping export?
>
> Deprecating exception specifications :o).

I don't think that broke any existing code, because there wasn't any :-)

Consider that I and some others agitated for dumping trigraphs. A couple of 
people voiciferously claimed that their entire code base depended on it, so it 
stayed in.

Never mind that that codebase could be easily accommodated by writing a 
literally trivial filter.

But now, to support raw string literals, C++11 has mucked up trigraphs. It's no 
longer possible to deprecate them without writing a filter that is pretty much a 
full blown C++ compiler itself.


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