Xref: utzoo comp.lang.c++:1672 comp.lang.c:12892 comp.lang.pascal:1089 rec.humor:15089 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!ima!johnl From: johnl@ima.ima.isc.com (John R. Levine) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.pascal,rec.humor Subject: Re: Standards For C++ Message-ID: <2701@ima.ima.isc.com> Date: 24 Sep 88 18:04:50 GMT References: <255@itivax.uucp> <6590064@hplsla.hp.com>Reply-To: johnl@ima.UUCP (John R. Levine) Followup-To: comp.std.misc Organization: Not much Lines: 23 In article eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) writes: > [ standards that define subsets are a hellish abomination] Before we put this issue to sleep, I feel compelled to point out that there are two ANSI standards that have sucessfully defined subset languages. Perhaps coincidentally, they are also the two oldest and most successful languages, Fortran and Cobol. The F77 standard is nicely laid out so that on each facing pair of pages, the right page defines the full language and the left page defines the subset language. There used to be quite a few subset implementations back when 64K was a serious amount of memory for a minicomputer, though now everybody goes for the full language. The Cobol standard defines modules at different levels, and you see reports that a compiler has the full language at level 2 with the file handling module at level 4, and so forth. In both cases, the standard gave considerable thought to existing practice, e.g. subset F77 is more or less the part of F77 that was already in F66, so that there is little incentive to misimplement stuff in the interest of making old code work. -- John R. Levine, IECC, PO Box 349, Cambridge MA 02238-0349, +1 617 492 3869 { bbn | think | decvax | harvard | yale }!ima!johnl, Levine@YALE.something Rome fell, Babylon fell, Scarsdale will have its turn. -G. B. Shaw