Lua C standard, especially C90 versus C99...

[sur-behoffski <sur_behoffski@...>]

G'day,

[Sorry for the non-threaded message; I read lua-l via the digest.]

Up until a few weeks ago, I tried to keep my code completely clean
with the C90 standard enforced (all warnings forced to errors).

I am on the GNU Grep list, with crossovers into other GNU projects,
especially gawk and glibc, and have noticed that they have decided
(I'm not sure when) to move from C90 to C99 as their standards
base, but are making the change slowly and evolving the code
carefully.

Part of their rationale for this change appears to be that C99
support is now sufficiently mature in all the mainstream
environments to be trustworthy [1].

This caused me to re-evaluate my C90 standard selection.  I've
decided to start adopting C99, still writing C90-conformant code
for 95+% of cases, but rely on C99 where there is a difference.

The main reason for this is better IEEE 754-1985 floating-point
support.  While I'm not that flash on maths, I have enough snippets
of knowledge to respect the numerical-methods expertise of others
in this area, such that I believe that the change is worthwhile.

cheers,

sur-behoffski (Brenton Hoff)
Programmer, Grouse Software

[1] I acknowledge that some of the key users of Lua are on more
restricted platforms (e.g. microcontrollers), where the C99 support
(compilers and/or libraries) may be much more uneven.