What should be added to C

[Mike Meyer]

In article <1518 at mmintl.UUCP> franka at mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) writes:
>This is not consistent with the experience in promulgating standards for
>other languages.  FORTRAN 77 differs from the old standard rather more than
>the relatively modest set of changes I proposed; it has been widely adopted,
>essentially all new FORTRAN compilers adhere to the standard, and such
>compilers have been made available for most machines still in use on which
>an older compiler is available.

The thing about F77 (and FIV vs FII) is that most of the features in
the F77 standard had already been implemented - or at least something
similar to them - in most compilers already.  The standard was, as
someone (many someones?) keep saying, an effort in standardizing
existing practices, not creating new ones.  The most significant
change that wasn't in general use was the 0-iteration do loop; the
change that caused the most howling (at least the most amusing
howling) was not printing a field of "*"'s for values that wouldn't
fit in the format field specified. I think that your proposed
changes are more serious than those two cases.

In light of this, the way to get people to adopt your proposed 
extensions (or anyone elses, for that matter!) is to add them to a C 
compiler, make it generally available, and convince people to use 
those features. Having a good book that teaches C + those features
will help a lot, too.

	<mike