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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: noalias (was: Re: the "const" qualifier)
Message-ID: <11391@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 23 Oct 89 15:40:00 GMT
References: <12239@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <11301@smoke.BRL.MIL> <3728@solo10.cs.vu.nl> <11320@smoke.BRL.MIL> <742@ccssrv.UUCP> <1989Oct19.162849.20265@utzoo.uucp> <11351@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1989Oct22.002400.24104@utzoo.uucp> <30577@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 29

In article <30577@watmath.waterloo.edu> datanguay@watmath.waterloo.edu (David Adrien Tanguay) writes:
>You can breathe easy on that account. The changes I've noticed between the
>October and December 88 drafts resulted in a very noticeable improvement
>in the quality of the technical writing. It's interesting to leaf through
>a bunch of drafts to see the evolution of some passages, from wording that
>leaves you thinking "Huh?" to something that actually makes sense.

Our technical editors (mostly Dave Prosser and, before him, Larry Rosler)
invested a tremendous amount of effort in trying to get the wording to
say what the committee had agreed we should be saying.  A large number of
improvements resulted directly from the public review process, where even
when no technical change was needed to address some issue, we often were
able to perceive that there was a need to reword in order to reduce
confusion.  A number of the very last set of wording changes were devised
by a small subgroup that met to review the proposed responses to the
third round of formal public review; when we met for this, we discovered
that several responses were wrong (in the review subgroup's opinion) or
else they amounted to "the editor will fix this", which left us in the
position of having to figure out the actual wording changes.  The most
notable example occurred in section 3.1.2.5, which will immediately be
recognized by X3J11 members as the "Types" section.  In previous drafts,
there had been a technical term "top type" which was introduced solely to
help explain type qualification.  During every public review we received
comments about this, usually starting off "What is this trying to say?"
I think we FINALLY managed to explain the topic intelligibly, after
numerous previous attempts had failed.

I would not have believed how hard it is to write an adequate
specification like the C Standard, if I hadn't experienced it first-hand.