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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Types
Message-ID: <8024@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 13-May-87 17:58:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8024
Posted: Wed May 13 17:58:50 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 13-May-87 17:58:50 EDT
References: <7264@brl-adm.ARPA> <734@sdchema.sdchem.UUCP>, <293@osupyr.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 21

>  What we people who can program using the power of the computer really need
> to do is convince the X3J11 committee to accept the idea that overloaded
> operators, defining of new types (not like C++), defining of operator
> symbols corresponding to operations not included in the default language,
> forcing inline, substitution of compiler-determined locations in inserted
> assembler instructions, and other versatile devices, and in general enabling
> the production of good semi-portable code is worthwhile.

Hmm, don't want much, do you?  I suspect that you could easily succeed in
convincing X3J11 that these are interesting and useful ideas if done well.
However, I doubt that you could convince them that (a) there is extensive
real experience with these features in C, (b) their implementation is well
understood (defining new symbols is a particular minefield), (c) there is
a crying need for these facilities, or (d) they are not such drastic changes
that they constitute definition of a new language.

If you want to define a new language with all these goodies, go ahead.
But this sure doesn't sound like C, and C is what X3J11 is standardizing.
-- 
"The average nutritional value    Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
of promises is roughly zero."     {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry