the "const" qualifier

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <3753 at pinas.cs.vu.nl> maart at cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath) writes:
>Wouldn't it have been beautiful, if X3J11 had been given another year...
>Of course I've been wrong sometimes, but there ARE things which were
>handled rather in a rush... (You said so yourself.)

Yeah, life sometimes requires compromise.

There was NO WAY that the C community was going to wait much longer;
the commercial importance of C had increased tremendously since the
time that the standardization effort began.

For the record, I was the only X3J11 member to vote "NO" to sending
the amended draft proposed Standard out for the third public review,
which was expected to result in no further substantive changes to
the proposed Standard, because I didn't think there had been enough
time to adequately evaluate all the second-round comments.  Yet not
even I objected to sending along the final draft to X3 as the
proposed ANSI (and, coincidentally, ISO) standard, because I agreed
that in its current form it is certainly "good enough".  In fact it
seems better overall to me than any other similar standard I've seen,
and I've seen several.

It does not serve the best interests of the C community to keep
tweaking on the document forever, seeking after the inattainable
goal of absolute perfection.  If the Standard meets the needs that
motivated the standardization effort, then that's good enough.

You think the "short" amount of time spent by X3J11 (what was it,
7 years?) was insufficient, you should look at IEEE 1003.  Due
partly to unwarranted pressure from NBS (now NIST), IEEE Std 1003.1
was pushed out the door with major changes appearing only in the
middle of supplemental mailings after the final letter ballot.
Now THERE's a case of rushing through the standardization process.