Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!think!barmar
From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Fruits of X3J11 (was Re: quotes inside #if 0)
Message-ID: <29170@news.Think.COM>
Date: 11 Sep 89 03:08:58 GMT
References: <1989Sep10.004441.23090@utzoo.uucp> <14646@bfmny0.UU.NET>
Sender: news@Think.COM
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
Lines: 21

In article <14646@bfmny0.UU.NET> tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) writes:
>It seems to me that questions of "what do you do if X follows Y under
>condition Z" would be a lot easier to deal with if the answer were
>"whatever Standard C does" rather than "well what we MEANT to say in
>paragraph 1.37.6 was..."

Until someone asks the question "what do you do if X follows Y under
condition Z", NO ONE knows the intended answer, not even the
implementor of Standard C.  The whole point of the interpretations
phase is to deal with ambiguities and omissions in the standard that
weren't found during the drafting and review phases (no matter how
hard you try, it's virtually impossible to make a complete language
standard).  Your proposal would cast in concrete any arbitrary or
unintentional implementation decisions made by the Standard C
implementor.

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
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