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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Printing binary (was: Re: Why college?)
Message-ID: <6596@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 26-Oct-87 16:52:48 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.6596
Posted: Mon Oct 26 16:52:48 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 28-Oct-87 22:31:02 EST
References: <35@ateng.UUCP> <3194@sol.ARPA> <2783@xanth.UUCP> <235@snark.UUCP> <2072@watcgl.waterloo.edu> <1398@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 28

In article <1398@dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright@dataio.UUCP (Walter Bright) writes:
>I simply modified the printf() format to add a %b format specifier for
>binary format. ...
>Anyone know why ANSI C doesn't specify this? I wrote them a letter which
>they haven't replied to.

The replies to comments received during the first formal public review
are being edited into a response document and should be mailed to the
correspondents within the next couple of months.  My notes show that
any comment you had about %b was not included in your formal comments,
however.  Responses to informal letters from the public are less
complete than the official review responses; some have already been
sent to correspondents and others may be soon, but due to shortage of
manpower some unofficial comments may simply not get replied to.  We'll
reply to as many as we can.

Generally, for ideas such as %b, you may assume that if the Committee
did not adopt it for the Standard, it was mainly because the necessity
for extending widespread existing practice was not convincingly shown.
There must have been literally over a thousand suggestions for new
features, any one of which might seem benign, but the total weight of
adopting all equally valuable inventions would have been crushing.

I personally would have preferred a degrees/minutes/seconds floating
conversion to a binary integer conversion, but I didn't press for it.

While the above is not an official X3J11 opinion, as editor of the
response document I'm fairly sure it's accurate.