compilers (my favorite to pick on is Microsoft VC++6.0) costs all of us, not just the person who has clients that won't upgrade (folly, IMO) and
Not really folly, we tried to upgrade to vc2002 two years ago and gave up in the face of multiple optimiser errors generating bogus code (doing nice things like overwriting the return address on the stack), after a while we stopped fighting and stuck with vc6 til we got the project out the door. We have now upgraded to vc2003 and had a similar issue with the optimiser, this time we'll live with it as we have nearly 2 years to deal with it but if we we're still within 6 months of shipping there would be no way we'd change. Never mistake your own development requirements with those of others, some projects live a long a time and compiler stability is a major factor. Martin (and yes I hate vc6 but standards conformity is less of a requirement than correct code generation).