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From: dant@tekla.tek.com (Dan Tilque;1893;92-789;LP=A;60jB)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Reserved words in C
Message-ID: <1016@zeus.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 19-Dec-86 17:23:44 EST
Article-I.D.: zeus.1016
Posted: Fri Dec 19 17:23:44 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 20-Dec-86 07:37:56 EST
References: <1524@hoptoad.uucp>
Sender: rogers@zeus.UUCP
Reply-To: dant@tekla.tek.com (Dan Tilque)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton, OR.
Lines: 29

In article <1524@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>
>In a slightly related area, I second Martin Minow's request for a list
>of all the predefined words ("keywords" and library routines and
>#define's) in ANSI C.  I suspect that if people saw all the new words
>in one place, they would chop back the list, or move those hundreds of
>words into the "prefix _" category.  Since the standards folks seem
>disinclined, anybody feel like reading the whole text and compiling the
>list?  (gee, sounds like another job for machine readable text...)
>

I'm fairly new to using C but one of the things I liked about it
was the small number of reserved words in the language.  I used to program
in COBOL (#include standard_retch.h) a language noted for having many
reserved words.  (Between the ANSI, Codasl and IBM versions of the language
there were about 500 reserved words with more possibly being added
in the COBOL 8X version.  This did not include library routines, these
were all keywords.)

When I first learned C, there were about 80 or so words I needed to
learn (reserved words, preprocessor commands, frequently used routine
names and some miscellaneous).  I didn't have to learn the library
routine names or #defines in headers I never used. 

Is this going to change?  Is C going to become like COBOL?  I certainly
hope not.


 Dan Tilque				dant@tekla.tek.com