FreeTDS Development Group

["Castellano, Nicholas" <Nicholas_Castellano AT acml.com>]

> From: Lowden, James K 
> Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 3:30 PM
> > From: Christos Zoulas [mailto:christos AT zoulas.com]
> > Sent: November 5, 2003 2:07 PM
>
> > 2. constify server name
> 
> This raises a philosophical issue.  Sybase's published 
> description of, say, ct_connect doesn't specify any const 
> parameters.  Granted, that's old-fashioned.  But we match 
> them slavishly.  
> 
> Should we constify everything we can?  Should there be a 
> nonconst option in pursuit of --enable-sybase-compat?  If we 
> do that, should we convert all the stupid #defines to enums, 
> as Bjarne intended?  
> 
> If it were up to me, I'd say "yes" to the above.  Damn the 
> torpedos, better code ahead, say I. But I'm betting others 
> have more experience than I do with portability and 
> compatibility.  I'd like to hear from them first.  

I'm in favor of constification, and did a whole bunch of it a while ago for
DB-Library.  I don't think it affects ABI compatibility in any way.  I think
it helps improve compile-time checking of code, which in my opinion is
always a good thing.

I'm against converting #defines to enums for religious reasons.  I object to
any such conversion that doesn't also involve a change from upper to lower
case, and of course I object to any case changes that would break Sybase
compatibility at either the source or binary level.  Just my opinion though.
Here, have a few grains of salt.

Cheers,
--nick
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