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Backward compatibilityBackward compatibilityPosted Jul 1, 2004 2:41 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599)In reply to: Backward compatibility by giraffedata Parent article: The New Age of Programming But remember to consider the other direction of compatibility: Have you seen a recent Python program fail to run on a ten year old interpreter?...By contrast, I distribute a large amount of C/libc code, which I test with gcc -ansi. I virtually never have the same problem. But 10 years ago, there were still a lot of pre-ANSI compilers floating around. SunOS, for example, shipped with a bundled compiler ("cc"), so a lot of people never bothered to install gcc. Maybe I'm stretching things a bit, but then again, maybe you are, too. ;-) Shift that 10-year window back a few years, and you'll land right in the middle of the K&R/ANSI changeover. (Believe it or not, this exact issue came up recently: should Info-ZIP finally toss out K&R compatibility--which has some serious uglification issues--or nuke it in favor of more readable code? I favor the latter, but some folks think any sacrifice of portability is bad.) Greg
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