CompuServe Messages

Except for extreme situations, the compiler must pass our internal tests before we release it. This has ended up delaying releases (it happened twice in 5.0d that the release was delayed as new bugs were found), but we feel it's generally better to delay a release and ship a stable product, then to rush it and have a potential disaster on our hands. An example of an 'extreme' situation is the string-squishing option -ss. A problem with it was brought to our attention rather late in the beta test cycle, which turned out to be a fundamental flaw in the design of that particular piece of code. We chose to stub that code out in 5.0d rather than try to make radical design changes, so that we could release a compiler we were confident about. -Mike