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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C FLAW (my opinion, of course)
Message-ID: <6567@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 15-Oct-87 09:33:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.6567
Posted: Thu Oct 15 09:33:17 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Oct-87 07:34:19 EDT
References: <1298@wyszecki.munsell.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 36

In article <1298@wyszecki.munsell.UUCP> jwf@munsell.UUCP (Jim Franklin) writes:
>What is better?  Having a few companies with large resources and a large
>potential payback fix a few compilers/linkers, or have the entire rest of
>the C community rewrite many millions of lines of C?

This constraint on portable programming IS NOT AN INVENTION OF X3J11;
it is the sort of thing a programmer concerned with portability has
always had to take into account.  The half-million lines of portable
C code I've created, plus another half-million lines of less-portable
code that I personally maintain, do not rely on long external name
significance.  That's because I have been concerned with portability
all along, and resorted to practical measures rather than wishful
thinking.

I have absolutely no sympathy for programmers who ignored the clear
warning about this given in K&R and are now shouting that "X3J11 has
broken their (already non-portable) code".  No matter what the ANSI C
standard says, that aspect of your code remains exactly as portable
(or not) as it currently is.  The only practical effect of specifying
longer external name significance is to reduce the number of
implementations that will conform to the standard in the near future.
Because there are intentionally no COBOL-like "levels" to the ANSI C
standard, a programmer is in general unable to determine just WHAT a
non-conforming "C" implementation consists of; it could be
non-conforming in ways much more important than limited external
identifier significance.  X3J11 obviously decided it would be a bigger
disservice to the C programming community to limit the number of
environments that could be advertised as ANSI-conforming due to this
one issue than to support a larger range of conforming environments at
the expense of the portable programmer having to take proper precautions.

Your ideas about what is involved in improving existing linker and
object module format limitations are incredibly naive.  They WILL
eventually improve, but not overnight, and what the ANSI C standard
currently says applies about as much pressure as is realistically
possible in that direction.