Re: usage of #import?
Re: usage of #import?
- Subject: Re: usage of #import?
- From: Don Yacktman <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 14:43:19 -0700
On Sunday, November 10, 2002, at 03:30 AM, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:
Hi Wilfredo,
I do not exactly know the official reasoning from the FSF against the
usage of this feature, but as Stan points out in his email there are
indeed some valid reasons for not using it in ObjC code (in some
circumstances):
http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/discuss-gnustep/2001-October/013735.html
In over 10 years of using Objective-C in a variety of different
environments, I have never once seen any of these theoretical problems
with #import actually happen even once. So in practice, for Objective-C
at least, it is not a problem.
So my original question was more whether Apple will go and try to
'de-deprecate' it since they seem to have made their minds wrt using
this feature and since they seem to work together with the FSF or not.
But then, all this is not that important, I was just curious...:-)
At any rate, I can't speak for Apple, but as far as I can tell Apple
intends to keep using #import and that won't change any time soon. It
would be a lot of work to fix something that while theoretically could
cause minor annoyances, in practice almost never happens. (And even if
it did happen, it would be pretty easy to fix, once you knew what was
going on.) So I don't see the cost benefit equation resolving into any
action other than maintaining the status quo.
-Phil
PS: And yes, Don, I am also around since NeXT days and I know about the
long history this feature has. Call me pedantic, but just saying
'Stallman is wrong, end of story' does not solve the issue because
strictly speaking Apple uses the FSF compiler and thus stays in
conflict with the official guidelines. As even mentioned in the man
pages coming with Mac OS X (-W{no-}import)..:-)
Well, that was, to some degree, a weak attempt at humor. I'm not really
that dogmatic. I do agree that #import can be problematic in some
situations. I just turns out to not be a significant problem in
practice. Then again, I'd never use #import for straight C headers.
The reason is that #import is a part of Objective-C specifically and
isn't a part of C, so using it with C code would be IMHO quite
inadvisable, since it does subtly change the semantics of header
inclusion in ways that might not make sense for C code.
--
Later,
Don Yacktman
illumineX, inc.
email@hidden
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