Re: The Dreaded "Missing Subunits"

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> wrote in message news:<x7vu1kss4q2.fsf@pushface.org>...
> Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> writes:
> 
> > The sad thing is that although Ada is very portable in many
> > respects, the community of compiler vendors can't agree on
> > file-naming conventions.  Contrast with C, where everybody knows
> > what .h and .c mean.
> 
> Is this a joke? cos it's clear that .h and .c have absolutely _no_
> semantic content! (except, I suppose, that a compiler knows it's not

It must be. The problem is that most folks *think* they know what
those extensions mean, but the compiler could care less what you
think.

For instance, Tornado (the vxWorks development enviroment) comes with
quite a few .c files that are "#include"d rather than compiled. Good
luck figuring that out!

And of course most folks feel that C++ should have its own extensions,
but there is little agreement on what they should be. ".cpp" seems
common, but I've also seen ".C" and ".cc". The extension ".c" is
sometimes used to mean code that is purposely C compatable, while
sometimes its used for C++-only files. For headers I've seen
personally or seen suggested ".h", ".hpp", ".d", "..c", ".hh", and
".icc" (for inline header files). The C++ standard itself specifies
that quite a few header files have no extension at all!

Of course no matter what you use, the compiler won't care a bit, and
will happily include a ".cpp" or compile a ".hpp", if you tell it to
and the syntax passes.

References: http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/cml/cstyle/