Paul Sheer:
My question is: are the Python maintainers interested in such compatibility?
Although Python will always be strict ANSI C, are such changes not of general interest for the purposes of consistency of the source code?
I think it is unlikely that such a large patch and resulting C++ compatibility policy will be accepted. A benefit of compiling with C++ rather than C is link time type checking. About 10 years ago I converted a large product from C to C++ and found a few real bugs (that is users were seeing incorrect information) due to calls not correctly matching function signatures. While most of these sorts of errors are found by compile time checking against header files, there are circumstances where different contexts of header inclusion can result in differing definitions of functions. Neil