Thank Ghod, the noalias wars are over!

[Eric S. Raymond]

In article <270 at sdrc.UUCP>, scjones at sdrc.UUCP (Larry Jones) writes:
>[summarizes the tangled history of noalias]

Thank you, Mr. Jones, for that candid and lucid precis of Just What Happened.

I'm glad things worked out well, and hereby apologize for any of my previous
remarks you, Doug Gwyn or other X3J11 readers might have been offended by. I
did not understand that noalias was quashed about as quickly as could have
been expected given the meeting schedules.

I am also glad it was killed for the *right* reasons -- incomprehensibility
and the threat that it would break library interfaces -- rather than vendor
chuntering or some bizarre political twist.

I guess any committee should be allowed a quota of one *big* mistake, as long
as they fix it ;-). I will now return to the happier role of X3J11 supporter
and occasional mild critic. 

>There was a brief flurry of activity to try to fall back to one of the other
>proposals (most notably the array arguments may not overlap proposal), the
>committee was so gun-shy that even an attempt to simply declare array args
>an obsolescent feature so it could be changed in a future standard was
>defeated.

Personally, I would not flame anyone for proposing this. I think it's worth
discussion, though I have the obvious reservations about back-compatibility.
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond                     (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)
      UUCP: {{uunet,rutgers,ihnp4}!cbmvax,rutgers!vu-vlsi,att}!snark!eric
      Post: 22 South Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355   Phone: (215)-296-5718