Definition of "conforming"

John F Carr jfc at athena.mit.edu
Thu Apr 4 11:16:28 AEST 1991


In article <15680 at smoke.brl.mil> gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:

>??  That's a strictly conforming program, so every conforming
>implementation will accept it.

The only requirement I remember from the standard is that a single program
with certain properties be compiled correctly.  I think there is a comment
somewhere in the book (possibly not in the standard itself) saying that ANSI
did not want to write an ANSI C verification package.  If a conforming
implementation must do the right thing with "hello world" but is allowed to
fail on a complex program, that implies a restriction on implementation
limits that I don't remember reading.

--
    John Carr (jfc at athena.mit.edu)



More information about the Comp.std.c mailing list