Standardization questions (cpp mostly)

[Geoff Kuenning]

>From Martin Minow:

>2. Six-character globals are a way of life on Dec's RSX/RT11/RSTS
>   operating systems and will stay that way for a while.  If you
>   force a change, it will break the outside environment, which I
>   don't believe is in the committee's charter.

Oh, that's great.  The 11 folx haven't had time yet to fix the RAD50/6-char
stuff left over from 65K address spaces, so all the rest of us have to suffer?
Thanks!  Tell you what, though, why stop there?  After all, BASIC was
originally defined to allow only TWO-character identifiers, and the second
had to be numeric.  So, for maximum interlanguage compatibility, we ought
to restrict globals to the most restrictive common denominator, which appears
to be BASIC.  (Oops, I forgot TECO--register names are single characters.  So
we should restrict all globals to one alphabetic character!  This would also
simplify writing linkers, since they would only have to provide for a maximum
of 26 globals).  :-)

>   8.	I claim that nested comments /* ... /* ... */ warrant
>	a warning message -- that is a very common source of
>	error in the programs I see (and impossible to detect
>	without a warning message).

YAY, YAY, YAY, YAY!  I have probably lost a full eight hours in the last year
due to my habit of typing /* ... *? ... /* ... */ (I'm a bit slow on the
shift key at times) and then having to spot it by eye or even with a debugger.
This is SO easy to detect, and it is far more often a true error than not.
(Although people who comment out commented code by putting /* at the front of
the line will get lots of warnings...but they were playing with fire in the
first place).
-- 
	Geoff Kuenning
	First Systems Corporation
	...!ihnp4!trwrb!desint!geoff