[Rd] R-devel on FreeBSD: Support for C99 complex type is required

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 6 Feb 2011, Murray Stokely wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Rainer Hurling <rhurlin at gwdg.de> wrote:
>>> I think this is really a FreeBSD support question. In 2011, an OS really
>>> should have support for a 1999 standard. Darwin, a FreeBSD derivative,
>>> does and its help page says
>>
>> Hmm, on FreeBSD I really have no other piece of software which complains
>> about lack of C99.
>
> FreeBSD is planning on switching to a different compiler, llvm/clang,
> and so the version of gcc is stale, but still it should be more than
> sufficient to support C99.  FreeBSD started a C99 effort a decade ago
> and I haven't heard from this initiative in a long time as I thought
> it was completed.
>
>    http://www.freebsd.org/projects/c99/index.html

Hmm, the line

Implement new functions that appear in <complex.h>.

is marked as 1/2 done, 2008.

> There is I believe experimental support for llvm/clang built into
> FreeBSD 9, so you could try compiling with that instead of gcc.
>
>> Ok, I understand. This seems consistent. I will try to contact FreeBSD
>> support about it. Please do not change back the behaviour for FreeBSD
>> (towards emulation code) until this is clarified.
>
> Yes, please mail freebsd-standards at google.com
>
> I haven't looked at what autoconf is testing exactly but I suspect
> simply another argument must be provided in the autoconf script to get
> it to pull up the C99 math functions its looking for.

Maybe, but it is looking in complex.h, where the C99 standard says 
these must be (unconditionally).

>
>          - Murray
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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