C, and what it is for

[Henry Spencer]

In article <3162 at utastro.UUCP> nather at utastro.UUCP (Ed Nather) writes:
>> Sensible standards committees focus on standardizing existing, well-proven
>> practice, not on redesigning the language to try to make everybody happy.
>
>True. Look how thoroughly trigrams were proven before they were included
>in the new ANSI standard for the C language.

Yeah, and they've turned out to be a mess and a major problem.  I didn't
say that X3J11 was entirely sensible!  It can, however, be much worse --
sometimes a standards committee really gets the bit between its teeth.
Look at ANSI Basic.  (To quote Mike O'Dell:  "my goodness, the little
munchkins on that committee were busy!")  X3J11's attempts to invent things
have been relatively infrequent, especially if one stretches the rule a
little and allows C++ experience to count as C experience.  (Bear in mind
that there are more C compilers in the world than just PCC, and a number
of innovative-looking things in the X3J11 drafts actually have been tried
in one compiler or another.)
-- 
NASA is into artificial        |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
stupidity.  - Jerry Pournelle  | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu