CTRL(X) in ANSI standard (last one I hope)

Ken Arnold%CGL arnold at ucsfcgl.UUCP
Sat May 25 07:08:35 AEST 1985


In article <10948 at brl-tgr.ARPA> gwyn at brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) writes:
>> Face it.  We are going to have to kill ourselves trying to work around
>> the standard committee's refusal to let C work the way it has been working.
>What "C"?  Using undocumented (indeed, unintended) features present
>in one particular implementation is not the same as using C the way
>it was defined; ...
>
>C != BSD

Unintended?  That ain't the way I heard it.  In fact, if Reiser hadn't put
some way to do this in, someone else would have invented it, since it is
so useful.

Undocumented is only moderately correct, but neither hither nor yon.  It
is used this way in every Reiser-based preprocessor, and that means not
just BSD (BSD got it from Bell), but every Bell-derived C implementation
as well, and some other compilers, including some for micros.  So what
should be standardized on; most compilers or a few compilers?  And, if you
think that there are more compilers that DON'T do it Reiser's way (an
interesting idea), you might ask about how many lines of code are written
under Reiser-style vs. non-Reiser.

However, I promised myself I wouldn't get into this debate, so this is
the last net.lang.c will hear from me on this unles someone says something
truly wacko and I can't help myself.

		Ken Arnold



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