ANSI draft interpretation questions

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <15592 at haddock.ima.isc.com> karl at haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
>As pointed out in my previous article, scanf() and ungetc() together require
>two lookahead/pushback slots.  Personally, I'm surprised that the Committee
>did this.  ...

This whole area was the subject of long, emotionally charged debates.
The resulting specification was the only compromise we could come up
with that wouldn't cause someone or another to vote against sending the
draft proposed standard out for the (first) public review.  At the time,
we thought that unanimity for that vote was highly desirable (or even
necessary from X3's point of view, which we later found was not true).
However, seeing that it in effect gave everyone veto power, that was
probably not a wise policy, and we dropped it for later activity.  (In
fact, I voted against sending out the draft resulting from one round of
review.)  During later processing of public comments, I don't think
many committee members wanted to revisit the issue, since we had all
grudgingly accepted the compromise specification.