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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: null pointers of type JOKE* can't be dereferenced
Message-ID: <11447@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 31 Oct 89 03:17:36 GMT
References: <11380@smoke.BRL.MIL> <8952@goofy.megatest.UUCP> <872.254895b5@csc.anu.oz> <11432@smoke.BRL.MIL> <876.2549cbb7@csc.anu.oz> <879.254a0ba0@csc.anu.oz> <11441@smoke.BRL.MIL> <14820@bfmny0.UU.NET>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 27

In article <14820@bfmny0.UU.NET> tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) writes:
>In article <11441@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>>There is another point worth making here.  The Standard must be
>>subjected to more than mere "linguistic analysis" in order to
>>understand what it is saying; there is a gestalt that must be
>>acquired, and it goes beyond the simple expansion of words in
>>terms of their definitions, just as concepts in general embody
>>much more than is found in their literal definitions.
>This suggests a good preface quote for the Standard in its final
>published form:
>	"Never mind what I say, just do what I tell you."

Who is being quoted?

My point is that Linguistic Analysis is bogus in philosophy and
it is equally bogus in understanding the C Standard, because
one gets too concerned with classifying trees and misses seeing
the path through the forest.

Obviously, there has been a lot of effort put into getting the
wording in the specifications right, but focusing attention too
narrowly on the wording while disregarding the concepts leads
to silly interpretations of what X3.159 is trying to say.  That
would be inevitable no matter what wording had been used, unless
the entire document were a huge tract of formalism (such as
denotational semantics); X3J11 rejected that path as being of
little value to the typical programmer or implementor.