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Comment by Chabs | Hacker News Reader

That's handled by the preprocessor. It's literally just a "insert the contents of that file here" copy-paste.

But the preprocessor is part of the C++ standard, no? I'm really not seeing why it's ok for the preprocessor to refer to files but not the language.

Also, going to this level of trouble to support systems that don't have files seems... odd. Targets that don't have files, that I can totally understand. But compiler toolchains that don't have the notion of a file? That sounds obscure beyond obscure. I'm surprised such a system would be a compilation host instead of a cross-compile target.

We are talking about a language that goes so far as to make sure it functions on systems where the size of a byte is not 8, or where memory is not necessarily linearly addressed. People tend to forget how shockingly flexible standard-compliant C++ code actually is.

I get that, but there's also precedent for cutting ancient things loose. Both C and C++ have finally decided to specify that signed integers are two's complement: https://twitter.com/jfbastien/status/989242576598327296?lang... Also trigraphs are gone in C++17.

Trigraphs are gone, but it took a while to win IBM representatives over it

I don't think they were ever really won over, I think their concerns were heard and they begrudgingly acquiesced rather than vote down C++17.

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n421...

This C++ code actually compiles with clang++. Incredible!

    int main(int argc, char *argv<::>)
    <%
        if (argc not_eq 1 and argc not_eq 2) <% return 1; %>
        return 0;
    %>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C

Digraphs are still a part of the language. I would be more surprised if a conformant piece of code did not compile with a conformant compiler.

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