Why are character arrays special (e

[Henry Spencer]

In article <225800126 at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>>You have things in the wrong order:  ANSI standards committees are in the
>>business of standardizing ideas that have already been tried out and found
>>to be workable. 
>
>Bullshit!
>Proof by counterexample: X3J3

I didn't say that they always *stuck* to what their business was supposed
to be.  Sometimes they don't, and the results are icky.  Actually, my
recollection is that for Fortran 77, X3J3 kept fairly close to things
that had already been tried out in various preprocessors or variant
implementations; it's only since then that they've gone off the deep end.
If you want a *really* bad example, I'm told that ANSI BASIC is noteworthy.

>... And what about X3J11's trigraphs?

If you look at the wording of my posting, you'll see that I didn't say
X3J11 had kept entirely to existing practice, just mostly.  (And despite
all the screaming about them, the fact is that trigraphs are a minor
nuisance to implement and are most unlikely to ever bother users much.
Note that X3J11 has explicitly rejected proposals, even one backed by
a threat of ISO disapproval, to make trigraphs more elaborate.  I'm not
in love with X3J11 trigraphs, but the issue isn't worth all the fuss that's
been made about it.  At worst they are a minor and fairly benign mistake.)
-- 
The Earth is our mother;       |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
our nine months are up.        | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu