Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: setjmp/longjmp
Message-ID: <1989May2.161350.4167@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1447@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu> <1989Apr27.165319.23986@utzoo.uucp> <17179@mimsy.UUCP> <1989Apr29.232632.23997@utzoo.uucp> <10203@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET>
Date: Tue, 2 May 89 16:13:50 GMT

In article <10203@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET> diamond@csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond) writes:
>I >I and others argued, as formal public comments, that odd behavior of
>S >local variables should be restricted to variables declared "register"...
>
>Interesting.  What were the formal answers?  (I'd guess that there were no
>actual answers but only formal answers :-)

Correct! :-)  The answer to my argument about this in the second public
comment was essentially "we decided this some time ago and aren't going to
change it now".

>Perhaps the marketplace should be encouraged to support this pseudo-standard.
>If customers refuse to buy compilers with misfeatures, even if the compilers
>are compliant, correct results can be obtained.

In practice there will be considerable pressure on implementors to "do it
right" in any case, since many existing programs will break with the more
liberal X3J11 rules.  I think we can rely on "quality of implementation"
concerns to get this right on any machine where it's practical.  (There
might be a few where it isn't.)  There are enough such topics -- where no
sane implementor would do it wrong, but the standard refuses to guarantee
doing it right -- to be annoying.
-- 
Mars in 1980s:  USSR, 2 tries, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
2 failures; USA, 0 tries.      | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu