ANSI proposal for preprocessor strings

[Henry Spencer]

> ... 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.
> [There follows my article saying "first-member union initialization
> is preferable to 'doing it right' because there is implementation
> experience with first-member and none with any of the various 'doing
> it right' schemes".]

I find it curious that Donn should cite this as a contradiction, or
a wild difference, from my articles saying "the Reiser preprocessor
extensions are vile and unportable, and should not be considered part
of C for ANSI purposes".  There is no contradiction at all, although
just why depends on how you resolve an ambiguity in Donn's comment:

1. "Henry supports first-member and not Reiser".  If you read the
	article carefully, you will see that in the (alas) absence of
	field-proven done-right solutions to union initialization, my
	preference would have been to leave it alone, i.e. nonexistent.
	I.e., I don't support first-member, although I understand why
	ANSI chose it rather than a paper proposal.

2. "Henry opposes 'done right' union initialization because there is
	no experience, and supports ANSI preprocessor features despite
	lack of experience".  The second part of that sentence is dead
	wrong, since I think the ANSI versions of token concatenation
	and in-string substitution only slightly less vile than the old
	Reiserisms, and think both should be stamped out like cockroaches.
	I have said so on the net.  I support neither.

Either way, no contradiction except in Donn's imagination.  I apologize
for bothering the net with this, but public slander requires public
response.  Further debate on this should go by private mail.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry