Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!atanasoff!hascall
From: hascall@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (John Hascall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Uninitialized externals and statics
Message-ID: <1392@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu>
Date: 28 Aug 89 13:53:47 GMT
References: <2128@infmx.UUCP> <4700042@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1989Aug25.185428.3511@utzoo.uucp> <609@paperboy.OSF.ORG> <10831@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: hascall@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu.UUCP (John Hascall)
Organization: Iowa State Univ. Computation Center
Lines: 26

In article <10831@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
 
}The proposed C standard does impose some constraints on implementations
}that were not technically necessary.  [...binary numeration...]
}'0' through '9' must have ascending contiguous integral values.
 
}The former constraint doesn't bother me, but the latter does.

      Why!!! 
      What kind of idiot would design a character code with '0'..'9'
      in any other fashion.  The same can be said for 'a'..'z' and
      'A'..'Z', but we know which idiots would do that.

      These are the sorts of things which should fall under the principle
      of least astonishment!  Just because something is technically possible
      does not mean it is a good idea.

      It seems like the committee spent a lot of time thinking up obscure
      technically possible behavior just to see how clever they could be.

      "In the Klat-Klala numbering system all the odd digits come before
      all the even ones, we should allow for this."

John Hascall
(ps.  Apply `:-)'s above as needed to smother flames)
(pps. I think trigraphs were a misguided effort as well)