30 Oct
2018
30 Oct
'18
12:37 a.m.
On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 12:30 PM Steve Johnson <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote:
We actually had a pretty good system for making
changes like that. First,
we would change
the compiler to accept both the old and the new. Then we would produce a
warning
that on a particular date the old would no longer work. Then we made the
old an error
and printed a message about how to fix it. Eventually, we just let it be
a syntax error.
This process was applied many times on the way from typeless B to strongly
typed C.
How long a transition period did you typically have?
Warner