Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 23:37:26 -0800 From: Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org> To: Dallas De Atley <deatley@apple.com> Cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: __P macro question Message-ID: <3C57A2B6.381884D8@elischer.org> References: <FD5651F8-1537-11D6-993F-003065766C3C@apple.com>
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Dallas De Atley wrote: > > Hi, > > I asked a question of our resident experts here at Apple and was > eventually directed to you by Jordan Hubbard. > > My question was: What is the __P macro used for in all those > function declarations in the BSD libraries and do we still need it? > > It was explained that this macro is used for pre-ANSI C compilers > and that while Darwin and thus Mac OS X compile with gcc 2.95, we retain > it in our code so that the diffs between our code and yours is small. > This enables the Darwin team to keep on top of changes between FreeBSD > and Darwin. > > After doing a little bit of homework searching cdef.h and style.9 > and encountering old jokes concerning the coming of Jesus (thank you > Google), I decided to pursue the question. > > Is the __P macro still necessary? Are there pre ANSI C compilers > FreeBSD wishes to support or is this macro effectively benign but > useless? > > If it is still neccesary I'll move on to bothering the resident > experts with other annoying questions, otherwise I'd like to pursue this > issue further. No it's not neccessary though some people will claim it is.. (they still have dreams of porting FreeBSD to the sinclair zx81 and fear that the only compiler they can find will not be Ansi...) (etc) I and most other committers are removing _P() from any prototypes we come into close proximity to, but the general rule of not making edits just for cosmetic purposes has stopped anyone from just removing them all, (though it is very tempting). Julian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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