Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!boulder!uswat!jbw From: jbw@zeb.uswest.com (Joe Wells) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: enum, no trailing comma? Message-ID: Date: 24 Aug 90 23:16:05 GMT References: <8@christmas.UUCP> <13620@smoke.BRL.MIL> Sender: news@uswat.UUCP Followup-To: comp.lang.c Organization: U S West Advanced Technologies Lines: 21 In-reply-to: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL's message of 20 Aug 90 00:02:52 GMT In article <13620@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes: Yes, the syntax does not permit a trailing comma after the list. This was the result of an explicit vote in X3J11. The basic argumentation was that optional trailing comma after initializer lists was required by the existing practice and had been deliberately intended (presumably to facilitate automatic generation of such lists, although I find that a weak reason), so that little bit of sloppiness had to be supported by the standrad; however, it was generally felt that there was no need to extend the syntactic sloppiness to the case of enumerator lists also. Why are trailing commas sloppy? And even if they are "sloppy", what's wrong with that? Shouldn't you give the programmers what they want in this case? C uses trailing semicolons after expression statements. Pascal uses semicolons between statements. How many people here prefer Pascal's less "sloppy" semicolons? -- Joe Wells