From the point of the user, it makes it far more user friendly than otherwise. Is there a flag, environmental variable, or some switch

Eric, I don't want to be a hair-splitter, but I do think this message does belong in gcc - it's a question of functionality, and how easy to use gcc is. I am trying to move to gcc-4 for its technical improvements, but I'm finding that it seems to be far less forgiving than gcc-3. This is having the unfortunate side effect that a lot of packages that used to compile perfectly fine with gcc-3 are no longer doing so with gcc-4. IMO it should be flexible enough to 'do the right thing' when it can. that I can use to make gcc-4 have the older, looser behaviour? (ie: to be backwards compatible with the large volume of code I compile and maintain). Here's another example I'm finding: Constructs of the form extern enum vtype iftovt_tab[]; are now failing with forgiving error: array type has incomplete element type This would be fine if it was code that I controlled - but the matter of fact is that this code is in /usr/include/sys/mode.h, which comes bundled with solaris 10, and the upshot is that I'm going to have to somehow hack solaris headers in order to make gcc-4.3.2 be able to compile perl-5.10.0. Which is just plain wrong. Ed On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 2:06 AM, Eric Botcazou <ebotcazou@libertysurf.fr> wrote:

[This is not appropriate for gcc@, please use gcc-help@]

...

That worked (thanks) but exactly why did it work? Shouldn't gcc be smart enough to realize that it is working either with a c++ file or linking to a c++ library?

gcc is the C compiler, use g++ when you're compiling C++, gfortran when you're compiling Fortran and so on.

-- Eric Botcazou