<string.h> .vs. <String.h>

[Shankar Unni]

dahms@ifk20.mach.uni-karlsruhe.de wrote:

> I have never heard about the .h-less includes!

I assure you, it's been there since at least 1993. See
http://www.research.att.com/c++/ , which is an old (1995 April) draft of
the working paper, but a decent approximation to the overall structure,
at least, of the current document. See the libraries section.

> Would it be possible having *identical* contents for both, depending
> on _CPLUSPLUS or some such, protected from multiple includes by the same
> ifdef, or both just including another, third file with a secure name?

It's possible. Actually, the C++ standard has yet another out for this:
the C-standard headers are supposed to be "officially" included as
<cstdio>, <cstring>, etc. (i.e. truly conformant programs are not
supposed to use either <String.h> or <string.h>), which does solve the
problem.

But you can't make the same file return different things for C and C++,
since it should be possible to

 #include <string.h>
  .... strcpy(...) ....	// error if you didn't include the C part

but at the same time, 

 #include <String>
 .... strcpy(...) ....	// MUST give an error, else namespace is polluted

So you can see - until the ANSI C++ standard is out there and in common
use, this thing is a can of worms..

-- 
Shankar Unni                                  shankar@chromatic.com
Chromatic Research                            (408) 752-9488
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