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From: pgl@cup.portal.com (Peter G Ludemann)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: Standards, committees, and realities (Re: Prolog standard)
Message-ID: <31440@cup.portal.com>
Date: 5 Jul 90 03:58:11 GMT
References: <15581@dime.cs.umass.edu> <3314@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
  <1385@quintus.UUCP> <3319@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> <1389@quintus.UUCP>
  <8265@mirsa.inria.fr>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
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> We are still waiting for a FORTRAN-88, I don't know if the "C"
> standard is finally out or not, I do know people were programming in
> ANSI-C long before the standard, primarily because I suspect so much
> was borrowed from C++ (which was well defined).

I was team leader for one of the first ANSI-C implementations and I
can assure you that it was no fun at all writing code while the
standard was being finished.  On the other hand, doing an implementation
does help in finding ambiguities in the standard. :-)

Anyway, the ANSI-C standard is final.  It only took about 5 years.
You'd be surprised at how many holes there are in K&R or Stroustroup
when one considers all the different platforms.  Clocksin&Mellish
is no better (or worse) than Kernighan&Richie.  

Now that there are more developers on the ISO committee, I'm hoping
that we'll see some real progress (if one looks at the ANSI-C
committee, almost everyone represented a C compiler developer).

- Peter Ludemann	(standard disclaimer)