[ On Sunday, December 19, 1999 at 11:21:48 (-0600), Peter Seebach wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: 64bit issues 
>
> >and just who goes about deciding how to 'change' a language???
> 
> An ISO standards committee.  Which, for the record, appears to have Dennis's
> blessing to adapt the language based on requirements that didn't exist on the
> original PDP and VAX systems.  ;-)

Unfortunately such committees, being almost entirely political animals,
usually find ways of weaselling in their own totally new features and
making unnecessary and incompatible changes to existing features instead
of simply fixing "bugs" in the existing standards, while at the same
time trying to claim that they're still defining a language called "C"
-- in realitly they're defining something that may not even accept code
written in the real "C" (i.e. K&R C by the time it was truly publicly
available sometime shortly after the book was published).  The C9X
standards committee had the chance to undo mistakes made in ISO-C (while
of course at the same time still creating an accurate and complete
definition of the language), but so far as I've been able to tell from
their drafts they've continued down the same path of invention rather
than standardisation.

DMR's approval of ANSI/ISO C was only given very begrudgingly and was
mostly due to the fact that he didn't have the time or energy to spend
moderating such a standards committee (I'm paraphrasing what I remember
of him saying about this in both public talks and personal conversations
and I hope I'm not entirely mis-"quoting" him).  I suspect he's
personally almost entirely divorced himself from "Modern C", especially
since the languages he no doubt uses for what day-to-day programming he
still does are far more interesting and far more "advanced" than the
mess C9X is.

Software standards groups still have a *lot* to learn from true
engineering standards.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
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