Union initialization

[Stephen J. Friedl]

In article <9733 at smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
> Look, I asked you guys not to propose ways of doing this.  All the
> ones posted so far have already been evaluated by X3J11 and found
> wanting in one way or another.  It's rather of waste of your time
> to worry further about this.

Some of us are not wizards of Committee quality, and as such we
don't really understand the issue as clearly as Doug obviously
does.  There is a difference between "OK folks, why can't XXX work
for this?" and "I propose XXX for the Standard".  The former can
be a very valuable tool for expanding one's understanding of the
deeper issues of language design.

In the past I've been generally favorable to a posting here or
there on how this or that feature in the language would be a nice
thing (hey, even /noalias/ looked plausible when I first read about
it).  Later, though, some helpful soul shows how it is not
portable or cannot be extended in the general case or exposes some
other fundamental flaw.  After a while, I can start to see these
kinds of problems myself: I think this is called "learning".

Saying "We said no so don't think about it anymore" does wonders
to foster enlightenment.

     Steve

-- 
Stephen J. Friedl / V-Systems, Inc. / Santa Ana, CA / +1 714 545 6442 
3B2-kind-of-guy   / friedl at vsi.com  / {attmail, uunet, etc}!vsi!friedl

    "vi2000: the editor of the 21st century" -- Dr. Bertrand Meyer