[cairo] "operator" keyword in libcairo

[Bill Spitzak]

On Tuesday 28 December 2004 05:15 pm, Chris wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-12-28 at 17:06 -0800, Ned Konz wrote:
> > On Tuesday 28 December 2004 2:14 pm, Chris wrote:
> > > I noticed that in libcairo there are tons of variables named
> > > "operator."
> > >
> > > Operator is a keyword in the Microsoft compiler and causes a lot of
> > > pain when trying to compile over there.  I'm going to rename them to
> > > "op" or something and see how it goes from there.
> >
> > It shouldn't be a keyword in a C compiler (though of course it is in
> > C++), should it? Do they also reserve new, delete, etc.?
>
> Good question.  Maybe the compiler was working in C++ mode or something.
> It shouldn't be since they are all ".c" files as far as I know.
> Obviously something was tripping up though.  I'll have to look into it.

It is not uncommon for people to configure MSVC to compile all ".c" files as 
C++. This is because they want to use ".C" as the C++ extension, and 
Microsoft refuses to let you use the case of the extension as a deciding 
factor (this has NOTHING to do with case-insensitive file systems, it only 
requires a case-preserving file system, which Windows has, so this is just 
Microsoft being their normal pigheaded selves...). I have done this at times, 
and have seen many other people with this setup.

I have generally found that if I want open source Windows stuff to compile as 
C and not C++ I have to use the extern "C" in the source code, with #ifdef 
c_plus_plus, much like a header file. No matter what the filename is, as 
people have configured MSVC and the other Windows compilers (Borland, Cygwin, 
etc) in all kinds of strange ways such that I have no way to control it other 
than this.

It is also probably best to avoid all C++ keywords in all the code. You may 
not believe it, but there is a remote chance that you might want to switch to 
C++ or D or some other future language, so don't make it impossible.