Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!sdrc!scjones From: scjones@sdrc.UUCP (Larry Jones) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Fruits of X3J11 Message-ID: <795@sdrc.UUCP> Date: 10 Sep 89 18:31:43 GMT References: <1989Sep10.004441.23090@utzoo.uucp> <14646@bfmny0.UU.NET> <11023@smoke.BRL.MIL> Organization: Structural Dynamics Research Corp., Cincinnati Lines: 39 In article <11023@smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes: > In article <1989Sep10.075346.1685@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: > >And any formal notation has readability problems for anyone but > >the High Priests. > > It was proposed that the C language standard be expressed using > a formal semantic specification language. The majority of the > committee didn't wish to do that. Although it was before my time, > I suspect that a major reason was the large amount of extra effort > it would take for many members to come up to speed on the technique. Actually, there was more concern about those reading the standard. Since most of the committee members are compiler implementers, most of them were at least slightly familiar with at least some of the formalisms and didn't feel like it would be a major problem to become familiar enough with whatever got chosen to use it. (Besides, we were writing the standard, so we'd KNOW what it said, even if we couldn't understand it!) ;-) But nearly everyone wanted it to be of use to ordinary programmers as well as implementers, and there was some concern that not all implementers would take the effort to understand the formalism (think back to some of the supposedly C implementations that were available in '83). > However, by the end of the public review process, I'd become > convinced that we probably would have been better off using a > formal specification language. I wouldn't say I was convinced, but I had begun to seriously doubt the original decision (which I heartily endorsed at the time). ---- Larry Jones UUCP: uunet!sdrc!scjones SDRC scjones@SDRC.UU.NET 2000 Eastman Dr. BIX: ltl Milford, OH 45150-2789 AT&T: (513) 576-2070 "I have plenty of good sense. I just choose to ignore it." -Calvin