Carrying around excess baggage.
Doug Gwyn
gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL
Thu Aug 31 07:59:23 AEST 1989
In article <1418 at atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> hascall at atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (John Hascall) writes:
> All the (proposed) ANSI C standard seems to have done is made every
> quirky little implementation "official".
That's definitely not true. Implementations were allowed freedom where
it was obviously necessary, and where C's use as a systems programming
language required it. This is not new; C has always had these loosities.
In many ways the proposed standard requires existing practice to be
"tightened up".
> Other scientific and engineering disciplines have managed to shed
> their past false steps, why can't we?
They don't close down old, safe bridges simply because a new bridge
design would be better in the light of current knowledge.
> Some items I would like to see investigated by the "committee on
> un-American programming activities":
> # of bits in a byte
> # of bytes in data types
There is no reasonable defense I know of for over-constraining these.
I don't even LIKE bytes, and I sure don't want to be told that my
computer designs have to provide exactly 8-bit chunking.
> character encoding
> floating point data format
There are standards for this, but they're not universally adopted.
I guess it was hard to convince people that they should discard
billions of dollars' worth of existing equipment and software.
> integer data format (signing schemes, etc)
> endian-ness
> interpretation of shift operations
There are good arguments for allowing freedom for these designs.
> internal value of NULL pointer
This one is nobody's business.
> a constant pointer size
This one would serve no useful purpose and would be problematic for
word-oriented (i.e. FAST) architectures.
etc.
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