GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns

GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns

Posted Dec 27, 2012 9:14 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns by Del-
Parent article: GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns

Judging by the attitude towards the existing C standards, I am actually a bit in the dark as to whether coding standards are even wanted. Are you sure you want it?

It's not the question of "want", it's the question of "need". C++ is built in "no policy" fashion. In a sense it's not a language, but meta-language. You can use many different styles in it (similarly to C, actually, but much, much worse). Thus it needs a style guide.

It's funny, really: when people discuss various style guides usually a lot of heat exchanged on the question of where to put braces, but these are minor issues. Things like "do we want to support exceptions" are fundamental: RAII is much less powerful without them, but, on the other hand it's basically impossible to create exception-safe code unless it's created this way from the beginning. And these should be discussed and resolved somewhere. It's possible to use C++ with or without exceptions, but these are almost like two different languages. Similarly with auto/declspec: you can write code which is very Ocaml-like (as in: it almost exclusively derives types from types of other objects or functions) or you can write more C-like code (where only some local objects don't have a fixed declared type). This too, is a large difference (although smaller then exceptions).

And, back to braces: yes, these decisions are minor but still there are few different styles for C++-only constructs and it'll be nice to have one "canonical form" for them.

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