Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Weird problem with C compiler under SCO - I can't believe it! Message-ID: <599@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> Date: 28 Sep 89 15:26:14 GMT References: <71@promark.UUCP> <14561@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <940@bbx.UUCP> <1989Sep27.170304.2158@utzoo.uucp> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Organization: GE Corp R&D Center Lines: 38 In article <1989Sep27.170304.2158@utzoo.uucp>, henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: | In article <534@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes: | >Another thing which was left out of the ANSI standard is some name space | >reserved to the user. That is, some subset of names which they promise | >not to snatch away in the next standard... | | [ discussion of names which are reserved ] | | The classes of reserved identifiers are admittedly annoyingly large, but | the promise to reserve nothing else is of considerable importance. But they *didn't* promise not to, they said they haven't yet. The feature I mentioned as missing was a statement that not future reserved words will be of the form {choose one}. | | If by "the next standard" you mean a revised C standard, either the | revision will be upward-compatible or not. If so, it has to preserve | these promises. If not, then asking today's standard to make promises | on its behalf is silly. There are no promises for the future, only the present standard. It would have been simple to define a namespace is intended to be used only by applications. My example in another posting was starting with three alpha chars and an underscore. Thus, if I want to be sure I don't have to edit my source, I can use those names exclusively. I assume that future committees will be composed of thoughtful people. I was on X3J11 for two years until my group ran out of T&L money. Now I'm in another group and I hope that I'll be able to join the next committee. If this future committee had any hint as to what names applications use, they would pick others. What I suggest is that this committee could have passed a hint on to the programmers and any future committees about what space could be left to the application. -- bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen) "The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called 'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see that the world is flat!" - anon