ANSI compliant compilers [Was Re: Re: How ANSI is TC++?]

[Shankar Unni]

Doug McDonald (mcdonald at aries.scs.uiuc.edu) writes:
> Microsoft is not ANSI compliant. They lack a few of the obscure
> things like locale support. I believe that to date there are no
> ANSI compliant compilers. Microsoft is extremely close.

#pragma drift on

I wish there were a little more context to this assertion of yours: I
presume you mean "no ANSI compliant compilers on DOS". The HP C compilers
on HP-UX 7.0, to take just one example, are totally ANSI-compliant (at
least, as measured by the Plum-Hall validation suite) - one of the very
first compilers to achieve this goal.  I assume that there are now many
others in this category as well.

#pragma drift off

Anyway, to get back to the main query: Walter was not being snippy at all.
He's right - there's no *official* standard for C++. "The ANSI standard"
[sic] (ANSI X3.159) is for the *C* language, not for C++.

C++ is by no means a total superset of ANSI C (there are many subtle but
significant differences). To date, the "de-facto" standard is the AT&T
implementation of "cfront", and the book "The Annotated C++ Reference
Manual" by Margaret Ellis and Bjarne Stroustrup (Addison-Wesley, 1990).

There is now an official ANSI standards committee for C++ (X3J16), headed
by Dmitry Lenkov of HP.  They hope to have a draft standard by late '92 or
so.  At that point, we can talk about "ANSI C++" compilers.
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Shankar Unni                                   E-Mail: 
Hewlett-Packard California Language Lab.     Internet: shankar at hpda.hp.com
Phone : (408) 447-5797                           UUCP: ...!hplabs!hpda!shankar