Xref: utzoo comp.lang.c:8845 comp.sys.ibm.pc:14057
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: cdecl keyword
Message-ID: <7606@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 2 Apr 88 17:14:56 GMT
References: <1238@wjvax.UUCP> <297@ho7cad.ATT.COM> <1242@wjvax.UUCP> <7595@brl-smoke.ARPA> <4259@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 16

In article <4259@cup.portal.com> Devin_E_Ben-Hur@cup.portal.com writes:
>  Please don't be so quick to flame extensions that you don't understand.

Oh, I understand it all right.  But it is a botch.  cdecl acts as a
kuldge to counteract a more global kludge, rather than solving the
inter-language linkage problem directly at the interfaces involved.
The very fact that you have to declare that the C source code is
intended to follow C rules and not some other rules is ludicrous.

>The MS-DOS/80x86 environment is not pretty.

One of the reasons for this is that instead of devising elegant, clean
solutions to some of the genuine problems, instead ill-advised kludges
have been foisted off on the programming public.  There are other
segmented architectures that have not turned into such a morass of
incompatible conventions; some support inter-language linkage.  The
80x86 world has no excuse for the mess it has gotten itself into.