>Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 16:02:56 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Jim Wise <jimw@numenor.turner.com>
>
>On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Greg A. Woods wrote:
>
>> Leaving things as they are results in the least work all around.
>
>Sure, except for the fact that the way things are now is _broken_.  It
>has been pointed out several times that our current system in no way
>compensates for the difference in argument promotion between the two
>languages, with the result that you _cannot_ use either interchangeably.

Some parts of the system (e.g. unvis(3)) are broken, yes.  But I don't
think that means that we should dump the system we have for strict
ANSI; it's a lot less work just to fix the bugs in our existing
system.

>> But ANSI/ISO C is a different language.  The differences are subtle and
>> very dangerous since they can only be detected at runtime (or with a
>> good, true, lint).
>
>But I would suggest that the majority of our programmers are more
>comfortable in ANSI C, so in fact this danger is greater now than it
>would be if we upgraded.  Indeed, several people have spoken of code
>they have written but not submitted because they wrote it in ANSI C and
>did not have time to backport it.  And many more are writing in ANSI C
>and backporting to our __P() conventions, with all the reliability
>problems that ensue.

Uh, I'm willing to bet that most of the core NetBSD folks were
hacking C long before ANSI came along and standardized it.

Not submitting code because of a lack of time to shoehorn it into our
guidelines is not an excuse, IMHO.  Just submit the thing as-is and
whoever wants to use it can KNFify it.
-- 
Mike Long <mikel@shore.net>                http://www.shore.net/~mikel
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands,
hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -- H.L. Mencken