Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: C, and what it is for Message-ID: <1988Sep27.173354.16502@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <8809092242.AA20696@BOEING.COM> <1988Sep22.163950.13700@utzoo.uucp> <3162@utastro.UUCP> Date: Tue, 27 Sep 88 17:33:54 GMT In article <3162@utastro.UUCP> nather@utastro.UUCP (Ed Nather) writes: >> Sensible standards committees focus on standardizing existing, well-proven >> practice, not on redesigning the language to try to make everybody happy. > >True. Look how thoroughly trigrams were proven before they were included >in the new ANSI standard for the C language. Yeah, and they've turned out to be a mess and a major problem. I didn't say that X3J11 was entirely sensible! It can, however, be much worse -- sometimes a standards committee really gets the bit between its teeth. Look at ANSI Basic. (To quote Mike O'Dell: "my goodness, the little munchkins on that committee were busy!") X3J11's attempts to invent things have been relatively infrequent, especially if one stretches the rule a little and allows C++ experience to count as C experience. (Bear in mind that there are more C compilers in the world than just PCC, and a number of innovative-looking things in the X3J11 drafts actually have been tried in one compiler or another.) -- NASA is into artificial | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology stupidity. - Jerry Pournelle | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu