Re: [boost] Defining compilers suggestion

From: Rob Stewart (stewart_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-07-13 13:09:30

From: David Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]>
> Rob Stewart <stewart_at_[hidden]> writes:
> > From: Jonathan Wakely <cow_at_[hidden]>
> >> On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 10:55:37AM -0400, Rob Stewart wrote:
> >
> > What's to stop any compiler from using a 3 digit version number
> > sometime in the future?  Yes, GCC has moved on to 4.x, so there's
> > no 3.x version even close to that, and there aren't likely to be
> > (m)any more 2.x releases, but if you are going to choose a
> > convention, it ought to account for forseeable problems, right?
> 
> Unless it makes things too hard to read.  With typically seven digits
> in a number it gets hard to divide them into groups of 3.

It isn't *that* hard, but I do understand your point.

> Note that all the numbers above are wrong because they're octal.  You
> can't use a leading zero, so typically we'll be looking at 5 digits.

That goes to show how often I write octal!  I'd forgotten that.
We could prepend a 1 to all such numbers, just so they can have
leading zeroes for all components.  That makes them longer still,
of course.

> what's-to-stop-them-from-using-a-4-digit-number-ly y'rs,

That's always possible, but terribly unlikely, especially in
light of arguments suggesting three digit numbers were unlikely.

-- 
Rob Stewart                           stewart_at_[hidden]
Software Engineer                     http://www.sig.com
Susquehanna International Group, LLP  using std::disclaimer;