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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: The Standard / Re: Problems With Typechecking Enumerated Types
Message-ID: <4074@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13-Jul-84 13:29:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.4074
Posted: Fri Jul 13 13:29:45 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 13-Jul-84 13:29:45 EDT
References: <109@dspo.UUCP>, <3786@fortune.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 14

> Don't know why it was (as Ritchie The Revered reportedly said) "a botch"
> in C, except that it was such a late addition to the language,
> and may have violated some fundamental simplifying assumptions
> about how things were done.

Dennis talked about this a bit at the Usenix session.  What he said was
roughly like this:  "I had a choice of two ways to put enums in.  One was
to make them first-class citizens, so that one could do things like
defining arrays with enum subscripts and so forth.  The other was to
fudge them in as a restricted form of integer.  I did it the easy but
ugly way, and made them restricted integers."
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry