Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: unofficial December notes
Message-ID: <6882@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 20 Dec 87 00:11:28 GMT
References: <10917@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 22

In article <10917@brl-adm.ARPA> TLIMONCE%DREW.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU writes:
>What happened to the suggestion about a unary plus?

Unary plus is still in the language, but it no longer requires a special
non-regrouping guarantee.  Its behavior is the same as before.  Its main
reason for existence now is to permit tables of constant initializers to
be written like:
	-123.45
	+987.65
(Neither the + nor - are part of the number; they're operators!)
I.e., simply for reasons of symmetry.

Believe me, X3J11 was resisting the clamor for "parentheses grouping
enforced" (which is actually a slight misrepresentation of the issue)
for as long as possible, but finally two things occurred to change our
position on this:
	(1) Realization that optimization would not be hurt on many
	popular architectures;
	(2) Insistence on the part of an ISO member, that could have
	blocked adoption of ANSI C as an ISO standard.

Thanks for the comments.