Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!umd5!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Should I convert FORTRAN code to C? Message-ID: <8089@brl-smoke.ARPA> Date: 15 Jun 88 02:09:06 GMT References: <2742@utastro.UUCP> <225800036@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <522@white.gcm> <238@chem.ucsd.EDU> Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB)) Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD. Lines: 21 In article <238@chem.ucsd.EDU> tps@chem.ucsd.edu (Tom Stockfisch) writes: >Considering the viability of this scheme (that does not require >reservation of any library names) and the undesirability of >ecologically disastrous name-space pollution, does anyone know >why the ANSI C committee chose to reserve all these names? Three things. First, the Standard cannot mandate an approach such as you described. Such invocation details are not within the proper scope of the Standard. Second, X3J11 has been quite aware of name space pollution issues and has carefully limited the extent to which a C implementation can infringe on the application's name space, for the first time in history. Third, many C library routines are most conveniently implemented if they are allowed to call other standard library routines. The simplest way to enable that is to reserve ALL the standard names for the implementation. As an application programmer I think this is the correct approach. I do not WANT an application to replace a standard library routine with one of its own. That way lies danger.