Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!aplcen!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Uninitialized externals and statics
Message-ID: <10859@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 28 Aug 89 17:37:31 GMT
References: <2128@infmx.UUCP> <4700042@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1989Aug25.185428.3511@utzoo.uucp> <609@paperboy.OSF.ORG> <10831@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1392@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 32

In article <1392@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> hascall@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu.UUCP (John Hascall) writes:
>      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.

Well, you see, it is not the job of X3J11 to determine what is idiotic
and what is not.  It is X3J11's job to specify a maximally useful
programming language.  Gratuitously excluding certain classes of
architecture would violate the Committee's charter.

If you were to consider EBCDIC's 8-bit bytes as signed, then the codes
for '0' .. '9' would appear in descending order.  That's not excessively
unreasonable.

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

Not really.  We did spend a lot of time determining just how much
variation had to be accommodated.  There are many interesting computer
architectures for which a C implementation would be something to be
encouraged.  Not all of them look like the systems you've encountered.

>(pps. I think trigraphs were a misguided effort as well)

I think that most of X3J11 might even privately agree with that
assessment.  However, they serve a possibly useful function with
very little adverse impact (mainly on idiots who use "??!").
The real problem with trigraphs is that they've been misconstrued
as an attempt to solve the international character set issue for
practical programming purposes.  The current party line is that
they're of use primarily in code transport among varying systems,
not for everyday programmer use.