Re: conditional compilation

["William J. Thomas" <wjthomas@wcvt.com>]

How much dead code would you like in your flight control laws when your
inherently unstable fighter aircraft is pulling 6 G's.  Safety Critical
Systems and Mission Critical Systems in general should not be the home of
endless lines of code that act as scaffolding and flying buttresses through
a relatively limited phase of the software lifecycle.

The original developers of the language knew what they were doing when they
prohibited its use.  The problem is best solved with adjunct tools, and good
configuration control, not language features.

Besides that, just try to certify a piece of code with the FAA that has all
sorts of conditional compilation in it. As a matter of fact in level A
certification even that little piece of Ada code used in the previous
example would raise a flag.

Keep it out of the language, its lived for close to twenty years without it
so don't spoil a good thing. As stated before there are other languages that
make extensive use of it, if conditional compilation is what you must have
then by all means use them.

WJT