P1003/D4 editorial comments

[Moderator, John Quarterman]

Date: 06 Oct 85 20:21:37 +1000 (Sun)
>From: Robert Elz <munnari!kre at seismo.CSS.GOV>

Section 2.4 [ of Draft 4; Section 2.5 of Draft 5 -jsq ]
terminates with a sentence that does not belong,
there are no structures mentioned anywhere in this section.

[ I previously reported that this had been fixed by removing
the sentence.  In fact the change Doug mentions below was done.  -jsq ]

[ This sentence was changed in Draft 5 to say that all TYPES
defined in this file SHOULD have type names ending with _t.  -Gwyn ]

Several sections (eg: 3.3.2.6) indicate that longjmp is defined
in the X3J11 C language standard.  It is also defined in
section 6.  This seems to be one function that clearly belongs
in the C standard, I would delete section 6 completely.
(Currently it makes reference to "auto" and "register" "storage classes"
none of which terms seem to be defined anywhere, or within the
scope of this standard).  Deleting section 6 would also get rid
of the most objectionable (and unnecessary) sentence...
	However longjmp shall never cause setjmp
	to return a value of 0.
At best a caution that some implementations may not allow setjmp
to return 0 when called from longjmp would be called for.

[ The offending section was removed for Draft 5.  -Gwyn ]

[ In general, anything which is C and not UNIX has been removed
from P1003 and replaced with pointers to X3J11.  I posted a
detailed synopsis of these sorts of changes a couple of months
ago.  -jsq ]

Section 4.5.2 seems to be largely repeated in section 4.5.3.2.
The former should probably simply be deleted.

[ Draft 5 has instead uniformly defined data structures like
this at the beginning of subsections and omitted them from
the individual routines.  It also has put #defined constants
into tabular form instead of mock C code.  -Gwyn ]

Apart from minor glitches like these, I must complement the
editors, it is obvious that much thought has gone into wording
this draft in a manner that will result in just the results
desired.  Congratulations.

[ Draft 5 appears at first reading to be substantially better
organized than Draft 4 and also technically improved.  I
have only a few relatively minor quibbles with it as it now
stands, apart from the absence of a termio specification.
-Gwyn ]

[ Termio was a topic of much discussion at the D.C. meeting.
The former draft currently appears in an Appendix, with a pointer
to it from the text of the draft, saying in effect that P1003
intends to have such a section in the final draft, but it
was not possible to agree on that particular section draft
in time for Trial Use.  -jsq ]

Robert Elz		seismo!munnari!kre	kre%munnari.oz at seismo.css.gov

Volume-Number: Volume 3, Number 11