In article 2sp@news2.ios.com, aishdas@haven.ios.com (Micha Berger) writes:
> We already established in another thread that Sun is taking the
> conservative course and is /not/ trying to write a compiler against
> an evolving standard.

This is untrue.  We have put many many changes in the compiler as the
standard clarifies things.  What we don't do is knowingly put in changes
that break our customers code.  It's not always obvious without careful
study just which these changes might be, but we try very hard.

When there were questionable areas in the standard we have often
given warnings to indicate that though this is illegal, we don't
expect it to remain so.

> Therefor, if Sun's compiler prohibits something the ARM considers legal
> code, the compiler is broken.

Failing to handle template parameters as constants was an oversight.
If we had realized at the time that they were excluded we would have
raised this as an issue with the standard committee.  When we discovered
it, we did raise the issue.  It's not obvious that this is an editorial
oversight, by the way.  There are various reasons that one should be
very careful when generalizing about templates.

The person who evaluated the bug looked at the standard and correctly
noted that the code was illegal in terms of that.  This wasn't the
correct answer in the larger sense, nor was it our intention, but it
was a correct answer in terms of the data available.

You may be sure that we have changed this for the next release.

> In general, though, it means that one should not compare Sun statements
> or their compilers to the ANSI standard.

Oh come on!

Sun has the largest representation at the C++ meetings of any company,
usually either 3 or 4 attendees.  The chairman of the committee is
from Sun.  We take the standard very seriously indeed.

Mike Ball
SunSoft Developer Products


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