Proposed Enhancement to select/case (yes, I know...)

[Michael Meissner]

In article <13714 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
writes:

| In article <1990Aug30.164610.3519 at zoo.toronto.edu> henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
| >In article <BURLEY.90Aug30030645 at world.std.com> burley at world.std.com (James C Burley) writes:
| >>... how about this: allow ranges (and, perhaps, lists) on case statements.
| >Such a feature appeared in one draft of ANSI C, and disappeared in the
| >next.  I believe the reason was the usual:  there was no implementation
| >experience with it, and it was a minor convenience rather than a solution
| >to a serious problem.
| 
| That's why it vanished.  Although it was before my time, I heard that
| the reason it appeared was that the preceding X3J11 meeting was held in
| Europe and was overrun with Pascal freaks.  The Pascalisms were removed
| at the next meeting, where C freaks dominated.

Doug, you heard wrong.

It was one of the Boston based meetings that it got added in.  I seem
to remember that it was Joe Mueller then of Tektronix who lead the
fight to put it in.  Larry Roseler (original redactor of the document)
then of AT&T lead the fight to remove it in the next meeting, because
it was syntactic sugar that was needed.  In particular, one of the
problems that kept being mentioned was 'a'..'z', since on EBCDIC there
are 10 or so characters between 'i' and 'j' (and likewise between 'I'
and 'J').  I think the year was 1985, but it could have been earlier
or later -- definately before 1987 when I was transfered to North
Carolina.  The vote both times were fairly close (this was when a 50%
+ 1 person majority was needed to change the base document), so it
wasn't a case of being overrun with Pascal freaks.
--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner at osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142

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