Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!vsi!friedl
From: friedl@vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Union initialization
Message-ID: <1066@vsi.COM>
Date: 3 Mar 89 06:39:37 GMT
References: <816@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> <16019@mimsy.UUCP> <9733@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Organization: V-Systems, Inc. -- Santa Ana, CA
Lines: 31

In article <9733@smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
> Look, I asked you guys not to propose ways of doing this.  All the
> ones posted so far have already been evaluated by X3J11 and found
> wanting in one way or another.  It's rather of waste of your time
> to worry further about this.

Some of us are not wizards of Committee quality, and as such we
don't really understand the issue as clearly as Doug obviously
does.  There is a difference between "OK folks, why can't XXX work
for this?" and "I propose XXX for the Standard".  The former can
be a very valuable tool for expanding one's understanding of the
deeper issues of language design.

In the past I've been generally favorable to a posting here or
there on how this or that feature in the language would be a nice
thing (hey, even /noalias/ looked plausible when I first read about
it).  Later, though, some helpful soul shows how it is not
portable or cannot be extended in the general case or exposes some
other fundamental flaw.  After a while, I can start to see these
kinds of problems myself: I think this is called "learning".

Saying "We said no so don't think about it anymore" does wonders
to foster enlightenment.

     Steve

-- 
Stephen J. Friedl / V-Systems, Inc. / Santa Ana, CA / +1 714 545 6442 
3B2-kind-of-guy   / friedl@vsi.com  / {attmail, uunet, etc}!vsi!friedl

    "vi2000: the editor of the 21st century" -- Dr. Bertrand Meyer