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From: RMANGALD@CLARKU.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Why blast poor VAX C?
Message-ID: <8707181853.AA14121@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Thu, 16-Jul-87 13:42:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8707181853.AA14121
Posted: Thu Jul 16 13:42:00 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 19-Jul-87 01:15:38 EDT
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        In response to a query by John Yates (yates@a.chem.upenn.edu),
who is having problems with G-floating numbers in VAX C, listmember Erik
Naggum (ik.naggum-erik@siri.uio.no) writes:

>I regard myself as an expert in C and UNIX.  I have read the ANSI
>Standard Draft of 10/10/86, and Kernighan and Richie's "The C
>Programming Language".  With 3 years of experience in C programming, and
>200K source lines on my conscience, I have some comments to your
>article, blaming C for various flaws in floating point operations on a
>VAX (model X?), using VAX C version 2.2 under VMS.
>
>I took the time to go through a lot of documentation tonight, and
>visited those for (AT&T) UNIX Version 7, System III and System V,
>for SVID, for BSD release 4.3 and Ultrix 2.0, for XENIX 3 and XENIX 5,
>and finally those of SUN OS.  (Insert list of trademark owners here.)
>
>Nowhere can I find a reference to G-floating or, in fact, any other
>specific implementation of floating point numbers, as part of the C
>language.  Rather, I have found that each machine and each implementor
>decides which formats to use, and that they are more an attribute of the
>hardware than of the language definition.
>
>Why not put away your VAX VMS or your VAX C, instead?

        With due respect, Mr. Naggum, I believe you are blaming the
computer for the errors of the programmer.  Considering your proficiency
in the language, you must have undoubtedly caught the 
and the : Mr. Yates was trying to read in and print
out a  variable using  conversions.  Surely you cannot
fault the compiler or the operating system for this?  You have to agree
that such mismatched conversions will give wrong results regardless of
the C implementation, so long as the internal representation of 
and  are different.

        Mr. Yates got a bit carried away in bombasting C, perhaps
because (I suspect) he is not a programmer, and as non-programmers are
wont to do, let of his frustration on the language.  But Mr. Naggum, you
are a professional programmer, and surely understand the difficulties
faced by non-programmers, especially those who are grappling with an
unfamiliar language.  Bombasting VMS and VAX C is not going to solve any
problems, and programming language/operating system fanaticism isn't
going to get us anywhere.

        Let's generate more light, not heat.

                                Sincerely,

                                Rahul Mangaldas.