From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-Id: <200008011707.NAA25570@cse.psu.edu>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Installing the updates
From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com>
Date: Tue,  1 Aug 2000 13:06:50 -0400
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	Where's the horror here?  Computers are fast.  Pushing extra work on
	programmers and creating an unnecessary portability issue is a high
	cost.  Reading a header file five or more times during compilation is
	a low cost (and one which can be optimized away for ifdef-protected
	headers; I'm told gcc does so).

While it may be simpler when it works, when
it fails it does so in mysterious ways.  I don't know 
how many times I've tried to figure out why 
some header file I wanted wasn't getting included,
only to find that it had _already_ been included,
by someone else, with different things #defined,
so the definition or prototype_I_ wanted wasn't
there.

I'd much rather have the compiler barf on a 
#define or something like that, than hop over
the whole file as though it weren't there.

Russ