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From: bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: 'C' Standards
Message-ID: <181@sas.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 9-Sep-87 23:57:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: sas.181
Posted: Wed Sep  9 23:57:33 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Sep-87 09:06:52 EDT
References: <166@qetzal.UUCP> <157@hobbes.UUCP> <875@bsu-cs.UUCP> <2196@xanth.UUCP>
Organization: SAS Institute Inc.,Cary NC,25712
Lines: 34
Keywords: MSC,NULL segments
Summary: Standards are for working, not a target.

In article <2196@xanth.UUCP>, kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
> 
> Come on, guys, working standards are lean, clean, and don't cater to
> every brain damaged misengineering that passes by.  The point of
> standards is to provide a target of excellence for the hardware
> designers, not a museum of abominations.

I emphatically disagree.  The point of standards is to allow people to get
useful work done -- useful applications that need to work in lots of
different environments.  If you don't care about portability, you don't care
about standards.  If you *do* care about portability, you care about making
the standards work on the widest possible variaty of machines that it can
work on without doing true violence to the language.

The only thing the setjmp() rule seems to break is that you can no longer
assign setjmp to a function pointer and then call setjmp through the pointer.
I would be quite surprised to find that this is an exceedingly common thing
to do.

One thing standards are *NOT* supposed to be is an unattainable standard that
real-world manufacturers are hard-pressed to meet.  If you think that's what
standards are all about, look at Ada.  That is the result of such an "Aim
High" philosophy in standards-writing.

Sure, some whiz-bang gizmos will work better in your native environment.  And
I'll bet that some other things work better in the environment that has
trouble with setjmp/longjmp.  Yet the standard disallows both bells, so the
same code works on both machines.  And that's precisely why a standard is 
useful.
-- 
                                                         --Brian.
(Brian T. Schellenberger)				 ...!mcnc!rti!sas!bts

DISCLAIMER:  Whereas Brian Schellenberger (hereinafter "the party of the first