ANSI proposal for preprocessor strings

[Donn Seeley]

I agree with Henry that this issue is thoroughly beaten to death, but I
am still so irritated and exasperated by his posting that I felt some
small obligation to follow it up.  Rather than repeat the points I made
in my previous article (or amend the text in the response where I was
quoted out of context) I will simply reprint an old article of Henry's
and let the net speculate as to why Henry's attitude about supporting
ugly extensions to C seems to differ so wildly from one article to the
next.

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Date: 30 Jan 85 20:02:38 CST (Wed)
From: cbosgd!ihnp4!utzoo!henry
Subject: union initialization and paper proposals
To: ihnp4!cbosgd!std-c

I think the people responding to Larry Rosler's comments on union
initialization are missing an important point.  As far as I know,
nobody contends that the first-member rule for union initialization
is beautiful.  The key point is:  there is real live experience
with this rule, with a real compiler and real customers.  In other
words, it is known to work in practice, not just theory.  This is
of considerable importance when something is to be enshrined in a
standard.  I'm not aware of comparable real-life use of any of the
various other proposals.  Careful contemplation is *not* the same
thing.  Standards committees have good reason for taking field-proven
proposals much more seriously than untried ones.  Avoiding subtle
disasters is more important, for a standard, than maximizing beauty.

This is not to say that I like first-member union initialization.
Personally, I think it should have been "done right" (although I'm
not sure just how to do that) or ignored.  If I'd been a committee
member, in the absence of field-proven "done right" solutions,
I think I'd have voted for ignoring the whole issue.  Oh well.

				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
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Need I say that I agree completely with Henry's reasoning in this
article?

I promise not to drag this out any further,

Donn Seeley    University of Utah CS Dept    donn at utah-cs.arpa
40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W    (801) 581-5668    decvax!utah-cs!donn