Re: [Help-gsl] GSL and C99 standard

[Gerard Jungman <jungman at lanl dot gov>]

The other problem with C99 complex types is that they
introduce yet another possibility for variation in
binary layout, alignment, etc.

The three "complex" types that need to play together are
Fortran COMPLEX, C++ std::complex, and now C99 complex.
And there are (as of yet, AFAIK) no compatibility guarantees
for these on any platform, even though they should
probably work "most of the time".

It's really a stupid situation. At the very least, the C++
and C99 committees should decide on something. But they
probably never will.

--
Gerard Jungman


On Thu, 2008-04-10 at 17:41 +0100, Brian Gough wrote:
> At Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:47:06 +0800,
> Hongzheng Wang wrote:
> > Although C99 standard has not been fully implemented in GCC, several
> > new key features, e.g. complex type support, are indeed useful to
> > numerical computations.  So, I wonder if there is any plan for the
> > development of GSL to embrass C99 standard and adopt these useful
> > offers.
> 
> Do complex types acually work now? I haven't checked for a while but
> according to http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/c99status.html they weren't
> completed.
> 
> I would like to keep C89 compatibility, which limits the extent to
> which any new features can be used.