Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!and!jos From: jos@and.nl (J. Horsmeier) Newsgroups: comp.std.c Subject: Re: call to revolt Message-ID: <998@baby.and.nl> Date: 27 Jun 91 11:37:09 GMT References: <992@baby.and.nl> <782@taumet.com> Organization: AND Software BV Rotterdam Lines: 46 In article <782@taumet.com> steve@taumet.com (Stephen Clamage) writes: [...] >>Hi there, I'll die if casting lvals is going to be illegal... > >Sorry your life has to end so soon, but it is not a question of "going >to be illegal", but "has always been illegal." This rule is in K&R 1, >so it is nothing that the ANSI committee added out of sadism. It is just >that many compilers failed to enforce the rule. [...] >Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve@taumet.com Hi there, I know, I know, you're absolutely right, and normally I don't diddle code like I showed in my reply. And I won't die either ... but, currently I am working on an interface between *very* old C code and loads of FORTRAN stuff and I want to finish this project asap. To plough through all this f*ckin' code makes my mind go nuts, and invites one to fiddle/diddle these dirty tricks. I know it's all *absolutely* non-portable, it's dirty and should not be done, but I don't care in this particular case, I just want the thing up and running on just one type of machine, and these kinda tricks allow me to hack things together. I don't want to make a thread out of this, but I won't change my opinion about the `you get what you deserve' philosophy. I like it, if I deserve non-portability, I want to get non-portability. If I deserve segmentation violations, I want to get segmentation violations. It's my own choice. I don't want any committee to forbid things like that in any language. A language is supposed to be a tool to express yourself, the way you want and like to do so :-) Restricting syntactic and/or semantic richness of a language, just to avoid potential abuse by some zomby woofs from outer space is bad practice IMHO :-) See ya! Jos +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ |O J.A. Horsmeier AND Software B.V. phone : +31 10 4367100 O| |O Westersingel 106/108 fax : +31 10 4367110 O| |O 3015 LD Rotterdam NL e-mail: jos@and.nl O| |O--------------------------------------------------------------------O| |O I am a Hamburger (F. Zappa 1974) O| +----------------------------------------------------------------------+