[9fans] kenc

[9fans] kenc

[Saint Sexburga]

>If you guys really care about this stuff, you should participate
>in the process, rather than sit on the sidelines and carp about
>what others have done.

Doug

I can understand your annoyance with people who casually dismiss the
enormous amount of unpaid work that people such as yourself put into
standardisation efforts, especially when they include in their number
include such flippantly cocksure know-nothings as Uriel. However,
surely you can sympathise with those of us who feel that they are
drowning in the rising tide of complexity of modern computing
"standards". C99 is the least of our worries, but even here, do you
feel that Dennis Ritchie was entirely wrong in his answer to the
question "Are you satisfied with C99?", when he said, amongst other
things:

"I was satisfied with the 1989/1990 ANSI/ISO standard. The new C99
standard is much bulkier, and though the committee has signaled that
much of their time was spent in resisting feature-suggestions, there
are still plenty of accepted ones to digest. I certainly don't desire
additional ones, and the most obvious reaction is that I wish they had
resisted more firmly" and "Of the new things, restricted pointers
probably are a help; variadic macros and bool are just adornment."

As I say, C99 is the least of our, or at least my, worries. For my
sins, I use C++ in my day job. I can vaguely manage to do this as long
as I ignore the cutting edge work in Stupid Template Tricks (aka
template meta-programming) and the "peer-reviewed" garbage at
www.boost.org - e.g. a 400 page manual for a date-time library that
still doesn't do what I want? Give me a break! But when I see the
exciting new proposals to add yet more garbage to the C++ language and
standard library, I despair. Just look at the Boost thread library,
the basis for the new C++ thread library, written by people who have
apparently never read Hoare's original paper on CSP, written as
recently as 1978, let alone looked at any decent work in concurrent
programming since then.

And in my day job, I also have to use the wonderful SOAP standard. If
you could post a short reply explining what the fuck they are talking
about at http://java.sun.com/webservices I would be really grateful.

Doug, I'm not getting at you, but do you never feel, enough is enough?

Re: [9fans] kenc

[Russ Cox]

> Doug, I'm not getting at you, but do you never feel, enough is enough?

This discussed has strayed completely away
from being even tangentially related to Plan 9.
Could you take this to private email or comp.lang.c?

Russ

Re: [9fans] kenc

[Uriel]

Bashing standards is fundamentally related to Plan 9.

"Estimate that 90-95% of the work in Plan 9 was directly or
indirectly to honor externally imposed standards." -- Rob Pike in utah2000

Standards have done more harm to Plan 9 (and the software world) than
probably anything else.

"standards are the beginning of doom" -- Nietzsche

uriel

P.S.: And I guess insulting me has become an equally intrinsic part of
this list.

On 5/1/07, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:
> > Doug, I'm not getting at you, but do you never feel, enough is enough?
>
> This discussed has strayed completely away
> from being even tangentially related to Plan 9.
> Could you take this to private email or comp.lang.c?
>
> Russ
>
>

Re: [9fans] kenc

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

Saint Sexburga wrote:
> surely you can sympathise with those of us who feel that they are
> drowning in the rising tide of complexity of modern computing
> "standards". C99 is the least of our worries, but even here, do you
> feel that Dennis Ritchie was entirely wrong in his answer to the
> question "Are you satisfied with C99?", when he said, amongst other
> things:
> "I was satisfied with the 1989/1990 ANSI/ISO standard. The new C99
> standard is much bulkier, and though the committee has signaled that
> much of their time was spent in resisting feature-suggestions, there
> are still plenty of accepted ones to digest. I certainly don't desire
> additional ones, and the most obvious reaction is that I wish they had
> resisted more firmly" and "Of the new things, restricted pointers
> probably are a help; variadic macros and bool are just adornment."

It's certainly true that the bulk of C99 seems excessive; largely
it is due to having a parallel set of wchar_t-oriented functions
duplicating the functionality of the char-oriented ones (which I
predicted back in 1986 when we were still debating how to
accommodate extended character sets).  A lot has also been added
in areas such as floating-point that is of interest to a limited
portion of the programming community.  Unfortunately, a lot of
useful things naturally fall into the "limited interest" category;
we try to accommodate those interests with libraries when feasible,
but the key point is standardization so that applications are
readily portable across platforms (including Plan 9, to the extent
that it supports such standards).

Variadic macros are sufficiently useful (typically for printf-like
error handling) that GCC had already invented a form of them; we
would have liked to simply adopt that existing practice, but found
enough potential problems with it that we adopted a slightly
different solution.  

Bool is another example of numerous incompatible extensions to
achieve the effect (usually by programmers in this instance, rather
than in compilers), which is a good indication of a facility crying
out for a standardized solution.  It obviously isn't a "deep"
feature, which it can't be given the need to remain compatible with
existing C, but it is useful to have.

> Doug, I'm not getting at you, but do you never feel, enough is enough?

I understand the frustration.  Many standards and portions therefof
can be ignored if you don't need to use certain specified features.
Unfortunately, a very large amount of "infrastructure" has evolved
and a very large amount of current software has been built upon it.
Not long ago I tried to build GCC 4.0 on Solaris 8 and found that I
needed to install about a dozen nonstandard support libraries before
I could get it to build.  (I think that current releases of Solaris
and Linux are shipped with most or all of those libraries.)  In fact
I ran out of disk space and had to devise a workaround to get the job
done.  You can imagine that adapting such software is a problem due
to the large number of library interfaces that must be understood.

I don't see any way to undo the situation..

Re: [9fans] kenc

[Roman Shaposhnick]

On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 08:32 +0000, Douglas A. Gwyn wrote:
>
> I don't see any way to undo the situation..

  C at least has a luxury of vectoring off all the eager beavers
to a C++ committee, where languages like Fortran don't have 
a Fortress to protect them from mutilation yet (pun intended).

Thanks,
Roman.