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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: ambiguous ?
Message-ID: <11337@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 19 Oct 89 09:57:51 GMT
References: <1989Oct17.203733.23121@utzoo.uucp> <14091@lanl.gov>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 17

In article <14091@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>This is not to say that Fortran is perfect - it isn't.  But it is a better
>defined and more clearly specified language.  I know several people who
>don't use C simply because its behaviour is deliberately undefined and
>there is no clear way of explicitly overriding such ambiguities.

To be more precise, that may be their reasoning.
It doesn't mean it's correct.
Many other programmers have turned to C as being
much more useful for developing portable code.

The looseness in the C language definition is deliberate,
because C was designed for systems programming,
where it is important for the compiler to produce simple,
fast code without undue constraints.
Nevertheless, there are sufficient rules that programs
that follow the rules will be highly portable.