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From: tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Uninitialized externals and statics
Message-ID: <14608@bfmny0.UUCP>
Date: 30 Aug 89 21:06:32 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: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff)
Organization: ^
Lines: 24

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.  Among these are: integers must be
>represented by a binary numeration system (allows ones and twos complement,
>maybe even sign/magnitude, but not several other reasonable representations);
>'0' through '9' must have ascending contiguous integral values.
>
>The former constraint doesn't bother me, but the latter does.

These constraints are reasonable.

The penalty for violating them in some future character set or machine
design will only be the lack of a fully ANSI conformant C compiler, and
the risk that ported ANSI C programs which explicitly take advantage of
these constraints in the code (not merely using system headers or macros
whose implementations *typically* rely on them, since the weirdo vendor
could be expected to provide workarounds in his supplied headers) will
not execute correctly when compiled without modification.

I suspect the purveyor of such an oddball CPU will have many worse
problems to deal with. :-)
-- 
"We walked on the moon --	((	Tom Neff
	you be polite"		 )) 	tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET