Fruits of X3J11

[Larry Jones]

In article <11023 at smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes:
> In article <1989Sep10.075346.1685 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> >And any formal notation has readability problems for anyone but
> >the High Priests.
> 
> It was proposed that the C language standard be expressed using
> a formal semantic specification language.  The majority of the
> committee didn't wish to do that.  Although it was before my time,
> I suspect that a major reason was the large amount of extra effort
> it would take for many members to come up to speed on the technique.

Actually, there was more concern about those reading the
standard.  Since most of the committee members are compiler
implementers, most of them were at least slightly familiar with
at least some of the formalisms and didn't feel like it would be
a major problem to become familiar enough with whatever got
chosen to use it.  (Besides, we were writing the standard, so
we'd KNOW what it said, even if we couldn't understand it!) ;-)

But nearly everyone wanted it to be of use to ordinary
programmers as well as implementers, and there was some concern
that not all implementers would take the effort to understand the
formalism (think back to some of the supposedly C implementations
that were available in '83).

> However, by the end of the public review process, I'd become
> convinced that we probably would have been better off using a
> formal specification language.

I wouldn't say I was convinced, but I had begun to seriously
doubt the original decision (which I heartily endorsed at the
time).
----
Larry Jones                         UUCP: uunet!sdrc!scjones
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