Xref: utzoo comp.std.c:281 comp.lang.c:11975 Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!agate!saturn!chromo!joseph From: joseph@chromo.ucsc.edu (Joseph Reger) Newsgroups: comp.std.c,comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Third public review of X3J11 C (a scientist speaks up) Message-ID: <4566@saturn.ucsc.edu> Date: 19 Aug 88 20:42:19 GMT References: <64919@sun.uucp> <8358@smoke.ARPA> Sender: usenet@saturn.ucsc.edu Reply-To: joseph@chromo.ucsc.edu (Joseph Reger) Organization: Physics Department, University of California, Santa Cruz Lines: 48 In article <8358@smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB)) writes: >I don't mean to discourage comments on the draft; however, you should be >advised that you'll need some extremely strong arguments for making any >substantive changes. Examples showing that the current draft is badly >broken would help. The draft may not be 'badly broken' but is missing out on the opportunity to make C a convenient language for numerical computing as well. It is a pity that many of the 'real programmers' feel that any change that would allow C to be the language of choice for 'non-real programmers' (scientists) somehow would hurt their feeling/interests. I did not participate in the debates about the power operator, noalias, conformant arrays etc., because I was scared by some the vehemence of the 'defender of the faith'. It is sad that never seemed to be enough time to discuss some recommendations in detail. There are many scientist that I know (mostly younger people) who really came to like C, and we are using it despite its problems and deficiencies as far as numerical computing is concerned. I strongly feel that it is an unacceptable situation that many of us has to program around these problems, although some of them could be easily fixed. Much of today's (computational) science is done in a workstation environment, mostly under Unix. In the future this is going to be even more so, especially now that the supercomputer manufacturers are adopting Unix, too. The best compilers in these environments are the C compilers, period. Since the manufacturer often uses the same compilers for his own development, the user can be fairly confident that most of the bugs have already been eliminated. So there will be ever more scientist who program in C. Why is it such a good idea to have a growing amount of code around that contains ugly, difficult to understand "fixes"? The power operator is a small issue, I agree. Noalias (no flames please, I am afraid of you) is definitely going to come, since the vector machines need it. Only that it will come in many (vendor specific) colors and flavors. Conformant arrays? We (scientists) need them very much and I do not see how they would mean any grand problem for C --and the end of the western civilization-- in the simple version proposed by David Hough (see his "Comments on Proposed ANSI C Standard"). All these problems could be solved, of course, by the inclusion of the following statement into the Draft: "Scientist and other non-real programmers are not allowed to use the programming language C". (The funny thing is that some scientist would actually like to see this statement, not only in the Draft, but everywhere). Joseph D. Reger, joseph@chromo.ucsc.edu