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From: domo@tsa.co.uk (Dominic Dunlop)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c++
Subject: Re: design by committee (was: templates and exceptions in g++?)
Message-ID: <1990Nov25.161506.9659@tsa.co.uk>
Date: 25 Nov 90 16:15:06 GMT
References: <1016@zinn.MV.COM> <1990Nov23.211727.2802@zoo.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: domo@tsa.co.uk (Dominic Dunlop)
Organization: The Standard Answer Ltd.
Lines: 47

In article <1990Nov23.211727.2802@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu
(Henry Spencer) writes:
> In article <1016@zinn.MV.COM> mjv@objects.mv.com (Michael J. Vilot) writes:
> >...there seems to be sincere desire to do better than trigraphs as a way to
> >satisfy the legitimate needs of national character sets.
> 
> I would have hoped that X3J16 would not be re-hashing all the dumb ideas
> that X3J11 carefully considered and carefully rejected for good reasons.
> However, given that Bjarne was one of the handful of people pushing this
> specific dumb idea, I suppose I should have expected it...
> 
> The right answer to national character sets is ISO Latin 1 or equivalent,
> not ridiculous contortions in language syntax that *every* compiler
> *everywhere* then has to be able to parse.  Trigraphs were a mistake.

Yes.  Strange, isn't it, that the Danes are so in love with seven-bit
character sets?  We've seen it in C, we're seeing it in POSIX.  Looks as
though it's making trouble in C++.

I'm sorry if that sounds like an ethnic slur, but, as Henry says,
equipment which talks using an 8-bit character set such as ISO Latin 1
is an obvious (minimum) requirement for program development.  Any
software shop which shackles its staff to inadequate hardware deserves
every bit of productivity that it fails to get out of them.  Those who
suggest that the standards community should spend its time on
grandfathering in support for coded character sets already superseded
because of their clear inadequacies stand in grave danger of fashioning
standards for the past, not for the future.  While there might have
been a case for doing this with C, a language which, beacuse of the
time of its development, had a number of dependencies on a particular
seven-bit coded character set (ASCII), it seems to me to be
counter-productive to expend much effort on providing support for
variants of that old character set in a new language -- C++.


I hope that was clear.  Now let me muddy it a bit.  While I can see no
reason for the development of C++ software to be carried out on
inadequate hardware, it may be that the resulting programs have to
support an installed base of inadequate hardware.  Such is life.  I'm
talking about cross-development tools running on new hardware, but
churning out binary code for old.  No reason why the problem
shouldn't be solved that way.  Hell, it's not a new idea.  (Whereas
trigraphs were -- and a poor one, at that.)  How long has COBOL had an
environment division?  Not that anybody uses it much, I'll grant you.
But then, like trigraphs, maybe it just seemed a good idea at the time...
-- 
Dominic Dunlop