Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ Subject: Re: Unnecessary copying of returned object Message-ID: Date: 6 Sep 90 16:13:46 GMT References: <1990Aug31.234937.29938@athena.mit.edu> <1990Aug31.235606.166@athena.mit.edu> <11267@alice.UUCP> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 53 In-reply-to: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk's message of 4 Sep 90 21:18:59 GMT On 4 Sep 90 21:18:59 GMT, I wrote, as an aside to a technical discussion: pcg> Did AT&T want to make it very difficult for anybody but pcg> themselves produce a conforming implementation? Or at least pcg> to make it so difficult to understand what a conforming pcg> implementation is so that people would stick by AT&T's for pcg> fear of the unknown? If this has been true, it has failed; pcg> it is well known that cfront is not conforming itself, i.e. pcg> AT&T have shot themselves in the foot :-). This seems to have caused offense. I want to state that it was not meant as other than irony, which I hope was understood. Apologies to any party that felt this ironic paragraph was serious. Another aside on AT&T and standards: somebody once remarked that the SVID and its verification suite were designed in places so that apparently one *must* copy the AT&T implementation to pass it; for example, where multiple error codes could conceivably be returned, the SVID or its verification suite would accept as conforming only the code returned by System V, thus forcing other implementations to perform certain tests in the same order as the System V one. This was suspected to be a ploy to defeat cloners, and not sloppyness on the part of the authors of the SVID or its verification suite. It happened that eventually in parts the System V implementation evolved, other codes were returned, and thus *System V would fail to be certified as SVID conforming*. Now, this shows that probably, like in all large organizations, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, and this is often a more credible explanation than conspiracy theories. However the story has a moral: those who did not believe that AT&T had just been sloppy took issue from this, and founded the OSF, to ensure an "open process", not just an "open specification", which they believed could be tweaked. This is the one point on which the fact that now C++ is going to be ANSIfied is a win -- I would otherwise be confident that Stroustrup and his colleagues would do a better job, but (in the eyes of the conspiracy theorists) an "open process" is better, even if it leads to design-by-committee. The point of the irony was to (as is usual for me) show the dangers of complexity; with any work that is complicated enough and still evolving, even the organization to which its designer belongs has difficulty keeping up with it. There is no need to invoke conspiracy theories, except to make irony. I hope (against all past experience) that the ANSIfication, which after all benefits from the work of Stroustrup, Shopiro, etc..., as well as many others, will make the language ever *simpler*, and thus ever more accessible, to any user and any implementor, including AT&T's :-). -- Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk