Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Identifier length?
Message-ID: <6212@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 18 Mar 89 19:21:21 GMT
References: <627@maxim.ERBE.SE> <1989Mar16.171213.21210@utzoo.uucp> <6161@bsu-cs.UUCP> <1989Mar17.175939.1226@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 25

In article <1989Mar17.175939.1226@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
writes (about the 6-char limit and how to overcome it):
>Rahul, did you propose your notion to X3J11?  Formally, I mean, not just
>by talking about it on the net?  If so, what was the response?  If not,
>why not?

A good question.  I wrote my first "hello world" program in 1986, and
didn't know much about the real world of C until much more recently.  I
didn't discover Duff's Device and other tricky stuff until a year ago.
I didn't even consider proposing something because I assumed I would
have been laughed at for some obvious error on my part about which I
should have known better.

I sincerely doubt that I would have made a difference.  This was a
political issue.  Another one was refusal to standardize the common
practice of 0=normal, nonzero=error in exit(n), which requires a
but a one-line supporting function in the runtime library:

     exit(n) { _vms_c_exit ( n ? SYS$_ABORT : SYS$_NORMAL); }

Dont mistake this for a flame.  There may be political glitches in the
standard, but it represents a lot of hard work done well.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi
                    ARPA:  dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu