Standards For C++

[John R. Levine]

In article <dzj2T#X460J=eric at snark.UUCP> eric at snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
> [ standards that define subsets are a hellish abomination]

Before we put this issue to sleep, I feel compelled to point out that there
are two ANSI standards that have sucessfully defined subset languages.  Perhaps
coincidentally, they are also the two oldest and most successful languages,
Fortran and Cobol.  The F77 standard is nicely laid out so that on each
facing pair of pages, the right page defines the full language and the left
page defines the subset language.  There used to be quite a few subset
implementations back when 64K was a serious amount of memory for a
minicomputer, though now everybody goes for the full language.  The Cobol
standard defines modules at different levels, and you see reports that
a compiler has the full language at level 2 with the file handling module at
level 4, and so forth.

In both cases, the standard gave considerable thought to existing practice,
e.g. subset F77 is more or less the part of F77 that was already in F66, so
that there is little incentive to misimplement stuff in the interest of
making old code work.
-- 
John R. Levine, IECC, PO Box 349, Cambridge MA 02238-0349, +1 617 492 3869
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Rome fell, Babylon fell, Scarsdale will have its turn.  -G. B. Shaw