In article <Pine.NEB.4.44.0303060855250.18989-100000@lothlorien.starwolf.com> you write:
>I really wish the "open standards group" would pull out the broomstick
>attached to their head.  The behaviour has been around for YEARS.  Why
>are they "standardizing" against ease of use?

Well, the old syntax was marked as "obsolescent" in the 1992 standard, so it
was a fair bet that it would stop being required in a future revision unless
someone made a noise.  I suspect that no-one submitted a defect report
against any of the 200X drafts asking for the old syntax to be brought back,
so it just fell out by default.

There seems to have been a general problem that with somewhere over 3000
pages of standard, actually reading it and working out if there was anything
worth objecting to was more effort than many people (myself included, until
I discovered the "echo" disaster) were willing to make.

-- 
Ben Harris                                                   <bjh21@netbsd.org>
Portmaster, NetBSD/acorn26           <URL:http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/acorn26/>