builtins and automatic defines

[KW Heuer]

In article <1232 at utcs.uucp> utcs!flaps (Alan J Rosenthal) writes:
>Well I sure hope no one sticks in such a thing without telling me!
>Any such #include or #define things should not only be optional, they
>should have to be explicit.  So perhaps instead of merely beginning every
>program with #include <stdio.h>, you can also have #include <builtins.h>.
>
>*I* won't #include it, though...

They should be semantically identical, so what do you care whether it's
optimized by default?

I wonder if perhaps <stdio.h> (and <builtins.h>) should be included by
default, with an explicit "#exclude" to disable.  (Cf. "#undef".)  Probably
tricky to implement -- don't do the automatic "#include" until checking for
"#exclude", which must be at the top of the file (after whitespace)?

I had much the same attitude when I learned of the (then) new features that
allowed structure copy/call-by-value/return-by-value.  I wasn't using them
(of course, since they were new), and I wanted to see an error if I used one
by mistake (forgotten "&").  I was hoping for a compatibility option of some
type, like EO in TECO-10.  (A nice feature that allowed TECO to simulate an
older version of itself, so as not to obsolete all old macros.)

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ihnp4!bentley!kwh), The Walking Lint