From -8687792609584843880 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f78e5,f5cbd811817fe301 X-Google-Attributes: gidf78e5,public From: David Chase Subject: Re: `long long' (was: Re: Where next for Standard C++?) Date: 1997/10/28 Message-ID: <3454DAF1.5F4B@world.std.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 285480109 References: <3447ABB6.1C33@pratique.fr> <62oc8e$jd$1@shade.twinsun.com> <1997Oct24.113038.16972@leeds.ac.uk> X-Original-Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 13:18:25 -0500 Reply-To: chase@world.std.com Organization: Natural Bridge LLC X-Auth: PGPMoose V1.1 PGP comp.std.c++ iQBFAgUANFWQnuEDnX0m9pzZAQGo3gF9Hf9cSnixEp0f2dxNxNuydw8N96uotpvs /EtJvbKHU2uZVgwYGcMqk0HTz8M2l9Hv =K8xq Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ John R MacMillan wrote: > > |Also, contrary to other posts on the subject, there seems to > |be no breaking of strict conformance either. > > What about the following (admittedly contrived) program, which I > believe is strictly conforming C89 and should return EXIT_SUCCESS on > all conforming C89 implementations: I have a hard time getting too excited about this (been programming in Java since January, and used "long long" in C for years), but if I recall from my C compiler and C debugging environment days, strictly conforming programs are few and far between. Why do people think that arguments based on damage to strictly conforming C programs are compelling, given that there are so few of them? A cynic might say that only a sucker would write a strictly conforming ISO C program, and why do we want suckers telling us how to design a language? Or, to put it in other terms, there seems to be a little set of "portability rituals" that people programming in C or C++ must learn in order to achieve either de facto portability, or letter-of-the-standard (strict compliance) portability. Every language has some quirks, and funny idioms and rituals derived from these quirks, but C has more than the other languages I know well, and I don't think this is a good thing (*). People who have mastered the techniques of portable programming in C may feel proud of their acquired skills, but was this really time well spent? Wouldn't it better to "fix" the language so it does not require such skill to do something that ought to be easy? (*) any argument based on an inability to distinguish small non-zero numbers from arbitrarily large numbers is uninteresting. My children know the difference between one spoonful of spinach and ten, but a small non-zero number of people posting to the net apparently do not. I think it would be a good thing in any future standard if it were a little bit easier to write a strictly-conforming program, so that there would be more of them. This means that well-defined integer types need to exist, and there need to be well-defined division and remainder operations, and signed and unsigned integers should have well-defined conversion and casting operations (for example, when casting an integer x of type __intXX to an unsigned of type __uintXX, if x is less than zero, the unsigned result is numerically equal to "2-to-the-XX plus x"). -- David Chase, chase@world.std.com --- [ comp.std.c++ is moderated. To submit articles: try just posting with ] [ your news-reader. If that fails, use mailto:std-c++@ncar.ucar.edu ] [ FAQ: http://reality.sgi.com/employees/austern_mti/std-c++/faq.html ] [ Policy: http://reality.sgi.com/employees/austern_mti/std-c++/policy.html ] [ Comments? mailto:std-c++-request@ncar.ucar.edu ]