Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!umd5!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: X3J11 response to first public review
Message-ID: <6980@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 8 Jan 88 05:18:55 GMT
References: <11158@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 38

In article <11158@brl-adm.ARPA> dsill@NSWC-OAS.arpa (Dave Sill) writes:
>>Primary emphasis was placed on correcting technical errors
>>and removing unacceptable restrictions imposed by the specifications.
>Apparently there was room for considering new additions, e.g. noalias.

Yes, when necessary to address a deficiency, new inventions were not
ruled out a priori.  Thus, there are in fact some new features of
ANSI C that you won't find in K&R Appendix A.  An incomplete list:

	enum
	void
	signed
	long double
	const
	volatile
	noalias
	structure assignment
	function prototypes
	unary +
	%p format
	hexadecimal escapes
	multi-byte character support
	international locale support
	atexit()

Many of these are either found in some recent C implementations or
are based on features found in existing practice.  Some of the
features are genuinely new, and in the majority of cases it was
quite clear that they were sufficiently useful to standardize them.

You could quibble with a few of these, for example unary + (which is
the only thing listed that I could really do without), but the list
of additions beyond K&R Appendix A is remarkably short when compared
to the hundreds of suggestions the committee received.

Certainly X3J11 did not go nearly as far overboard with adding
features as most programming language standards committees, for
example Fortran-8x.