C Builtin Funxions

[Henry Spencer]

> One of the better things to come out of the COBOL standards efforts
> was the notion of specifying a minimum core language, then defining
> optional modules that were pretty close to the way the big boys (IBM)
> had actually implemented their extensions...

Whether this is a good idea or not is very much a matter of opinion.
As I recall, X3J11 representatives said at the very beginning that they
had explicitly renounced this approach, because there are something like
4096 distinct languages that meet the COBOL "standard", and this is a real
obstacle to portability.

In practice, of course, what happens is that implementations converge on
a few widely-agreed preferred points in this large space of possibilities.
So why not identify those points in advance?  Maybe one could even... pick
just one of them!  This is what X3J11 is trying to do, although it looks
like it's ending up as 1.5 rather than 1.0.
-- 
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