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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: goto's and switch statements -- mild proposal
Message-ID: <6289@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 18-Aug-87 14:59:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.6289
Posted: Tue Aug 18 14:59:55 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Aug-87 04:54:50 EDT
References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp> <916@haddock.ISC.COM> <298@auvax.UUCP> <10265@orchid.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 23

In article <10265@orchid.waterloo.edu> rbutterworth@orchid.waterloo.edu (Ray Butterworth) writes:
>    case 'a' :: 'z' :

There's another serious problem underlying all these suggestions;
namely, that "a through z" has a well-defined meaning.  Working
groups of /usr/group and/or IEEE P1003 are attempting to define
what regular expressions (which include case ranges) would MEAN
in a general, i.e. international, environment.  Personally I
think any assumption that there is a standard "dictionary order"
based solely on "letter" sequencing for a given language is naive.
The only well-defined ordering I think could be used meaningfully
in a standard would have to be the native run-time collating
sequence based on fixed-size letter units.  This would permit a
well-defined meaning to case ranges such as the above, IF the
native collating sequence is well-behaved (not EBCDIC, for
example, which has non-alphabetic characters within the numerical
range used for the English alphabet).

Probably an application would be much better off using
	if ( isalpha( c ) )
		...
or some other <ctype.h> function instead.  That is more likely to
give the desired behavior outside the USASCII environment.