Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Zero Length Arrays Allowed in C Standard?
Message-ID: <1989Dec13.102433.17621@twwells.com>
Date: 13 Dec 89 10:24:33 GMT
References: <2298@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <11715@smoke.BRL.MIL> <480@codonics.COM> <1989Dec2.210042.12668@twwells.com> <526@codonics.COM> <1989Dec7.195839.10012@twwells.com> <557@codonics.COM>
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 33

In article <557@codonics.COM> bret@codonics.UUCP (Bret Orsburn) writes:
: >Never mind that the committee included at least one feeping
: >creature, it was not their business to include every feature that
: >someone had dreamt up for a C compiler.
:
: There's a false dichotomy in there somewhere.
:
: There must be some ground between mandating a feature and forbiding it,
: or none of the unique features of any architecture can be entailed in
: a conforming implementation.

No false dichotomy at all. Reread the paragraph two before that
one:

: Nope. Doesn't wash. Only if feature X were either a de facto or a
: de jure standard (such as they were), or filled a very important,
: portable, need, would this be a valid argument.

In other words, OF COURSE, they should include some features. But
the mere fact that some systems permitted a thing does not,
without further consideration, imply that ANSI was remiss in not
including the feature.

Features they added that fit the above were prototypes, the const
and volatile keywords, and many things in the library.

To repeat what I said earlier: it would have been nice if they had
permitted zero length arrays and I even asked about them in my
comments in the public review, but it is certainly no disaster.

---
Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com