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* [TUHS] Misguided standsads (was What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?)
@ 2017-12-07 14:28 Doug McIlroy
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From: Doug McIlroy @ 2017-12-07 14:28 UTC (permalink / raw)


> Standards committees are not filled with altruistic folks working to
> make something great.

Not only in big ways, such as to sway the market. An example from Posix
is the undefined meaning of malloc(0). As I understand it, just one
committee member held out for malloc(0) to be an optional error, thus
confounding a harmless corner case with a fatal error. This nit has
burdened conscientious programmers ever since, all so one company's easily
fixable variant could be grandfathered into compliance.

Doug


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2017-12-07 14:28 [TUHS] Misguided standsads (was What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?) Doug McIlroy

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