Third public review of X3J11 C (a scientist speaks up)

[Joseph Reger]

In article <8358 at smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>I don't mean to discourage comments on the draft; however, you should be
>advised that you'll need some extremely strong arguments for making any
>substantive changes.  Examples showing that the current draft is badly
>broken would help.

The draft may not be 'badly broken' but is missing out on the opportunity
to make C a convenient language for numerical computing as well.  It is a
pity that many of the 'real programmers' feel that any change that would
allow C to be the language of choice for 'non-real programmers'
(scientists) somehow would hurt their feeling/interests. I did not
participate in the debates about the power operator, noalias, conformant
arrays etc., because I was scared by some the vehemence of the 'defender
of the faith'.  It is sad that never seemed to be enough time to discuss
some recommendations in detail. There are many scientist that I know
(mostly younger people) who really came to like C, and we are using it
despite its problems and deficiencies as far as numerical computing is
concerned.

I strongly feel that it is an unacceptable situation that many of us has
to program around these problems, although some of them could be easily
fixed. Much of today's (computational) science is done in a workstation
environment, mostly under Unix. In the future this is going to be even
more so, especially now that the supercomputer manufacturers are adopting
Unix, too. The best compilers in these environments are the C compilers,
period. Since the manufacturer often uses the same compilers for his own
development, the user can be fairly confident that most of the bugs have
already been eliminated. So there will be ever more scientist who program
in C. Why is it such a good idea to have a growing amount of code around
that contains ugly, difficult to understand "fixes"?

The power operator is a small issue, I agree. Noalias (no flames please, I
am afraid of you) is definitely going to come, since the vector machines
need it. Only that it will come in many (vendor specific) colors and
flavors. Conformant arrays?  We (scientists) need them very much and I do
not see how they would mean any grand problem for C --and the end of the
western civilization-- in the simple version proposed by David Hough (see
his "Comments on Proposed ANSI C Standard").

All these problems could be solved, of course, by the inclusion of the
following statement into the Draft:

"Scientist and other non-real programmers are not allowed to use the
programming language C".

(The funny thing is that some scientist would actually like to see this
statement, not only in the Draft, but everywhere).

Joseph D. Reger,	joseph at chromo.ucsc.edu