[m-dev.] diff: prevent double export

Peter Schachte schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU
Tue Aug 24 20:20:37 AEST 1999


On Tue, Aug 24, 1999 at 07:19:05PM +1000, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> Many other languages allow arbitrary numbers of declarations.
> At the time, I didn't see any particular need to be different here.
> 
> Indeed, I still don't see any compelling need to disallow more than one
> declarations, and given that disallowing it now would break backwards
> compatibility, I don't think it's really worth it.
> But there's certainly nothing wrong with adding a check if the result
> of the check is a compiler warning rather than an error.

One reason not to do this is that for machine-generated code it's
often a lot easier to just keep generating declarations without
worrying about repeats than to keep track of which declarations you've
already generated.

As long as the repeated declarations are compatible, what's the harm?

-- 
Peter Schachte                     We don't know who discovered water, but
mailto:schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        we are certain it wasn't a fish.
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/      -- John Culkin 
PGP: finger schachte at 128.250.37.3  
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