Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!caip!princeton!allegra!ulysses!ucbvax!jade!ucbopal!mwm From: mwm@ucbopal.berkeley.edu (Mike Meyer) Newsgroups: net.lang.c Subject: Re: What should be added to C Message-ID: <774@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: Mon, 2-Jun-86 08:29:58 EDT Article-I.D.: jade.774 Posted: Mon Jun 2 08:29:58 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 5-Jun-86 06:47:28 EDT References: <1462@mmintl.UUCP> <5498@alice.uUCp> <1497@mmintl.UUCP> <450@cad.BERKELEY.EDU> <1518@mmintl.UUCP> Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: mwm@ucbopal.UUCP (Mike Meyer) Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 26 In article <1518@mmintl.UUCP> franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) writes: >This is not consistent with the experience in promulgating standards for >other languages. FORTRAN 77 differs from the old standard rather more than >the relatively modest set of changes I proposed; it has been widely adopted, >essentially all new FORTRAN compilers adhere to the standard, and such >compilers have been made available for most machines still in use on which >an older compiler is available. The thing about F77 (and FIV vs FII) is that most of the features in the F77 standard had already been implemented - or at least something similar to them - in most compilers already. The standard was, as someone (many someones?) keep saying, an effort in standardizing existing practices, not creating new ones. The most significant change that wasn't in general use was the 0-iteration do loop; the change that caused the most howling (at least the most amusing howling) was not printing a field of "*"'s for values that wouldn't fit in the format field specified. I think that your proposed changes are more serious than those two cases. In light of this, the way to get people to adopt your proposed extensions (or anyone elses, for that matter!) is to add them to a C compiler, make it generally available, and convince people to use those features. Having a good book that teaches C + those features will help a lot, too.