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VC++ extension

Christian Tanzer tanzer at swing.co.at
Thu Aug 10 02:37:35 EDT 2000 
Courageous <jkraska1 at san.rr.com> wrote:

> > > This is because the designers
> > > of C++, in Their Equally Infinite Wisdom (R), ah, well....
> > > nevermind. Trust me, they biffed it.
> > 
> > Sorry - I dont trust you.  Please explain, ensuring that you take into
> > consideration that a level of link-time type-safety was a goal...  And
> > also the fact that it is only an issue for interfacing with C - if
> > everyone got modern, there would be no issue here, either <wink>
> 
> The designers biffed it, because they failed to design link-level
> compatability. This is a manycolored problem; a symbol name mangling
> standard would have been a good first step.

Many C++ features are badly designed, but this is not one of them.

The decision for implementation dependent name mangling was made
deliberately -- otherwise lots and lots of implementation details
would need to be specified by the C++ standards. This would
effectively tie the language to obsolote implementation technology. 

-- 
Christian Tanzer                                         tanzer at swing.co.at
Glasauergasse 32                                       Tel: +43 1 876 62 36
A-1130 Vienna, Austria                                 Fax: +43 1 877 66 92
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