Uninitialized externals and statics
John Hascall
hascall at atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu
Mon Aug 28 23:53:47 AEST 1989
In article <10831 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
}The proposed C standard does impose some constraints on implementations
}that were not technically necessary. [...binary numeration...]
}'0' through '9' must have ascending contiguous integral values.
}The former constraint doesn't bother me, but the latter does.
Why!!!
What kind of idiot would design a character code with '0'..'9'
in any other fashion. The same can be said for 'a'..'z' and
'A'..'Z', but we know which idiots would do that.
These are the sorts of things which should fall under the principle
of least astonishment! Just because something is technically possible
does not mean it is a good idea.
It seems like the committee spent a lot of time thinking up obscure
technically possible behavior just to see how clever they could be.
"In the Klat-Klala numbering system all the odd digits come before
all the even ones, we should allow for this."
John Hascall
(ps. Apply `:-)'s above as needed to smother flames)
(pps. I think trigraphs were a misguided effort as well)
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