In article <f7************ ********@bt.com >, Richard Heathfield
<in*****@invali d.invalid> writes
lovecreatesbea uty said:
Gordon Burditt wrote: >The standard
>implementati on is published by the international standard committee. Is
>it to hurried for the committee to do it? Does the committee take no
>responsibili ty for publishing a standard implementation when release
>the paper language document?
No. Do the people who write building codes build buildings?
It is the fact for C language that the standard committee published
100% standard compliant paper document. 10 years later, there is no
100% standard compliant compiler.
C99, yes. Please note, however, that C89 was a very different matter.
Vendors were rushing to conform to it, and most had conforming compilers
even before the ink was dry, because they'd been following the
standardisatio n process very closely. C89 mattered - and still matters.
Actually ISO C90+A1 and the TC's..ie C95/6 This is where most compilers
are. Generally they have taken a few items from C99 but not many.
Is it / standard not important?
C89 is vital. But C99? No, not really. Otherwise, we'd have more conforming
implementation s by now.
I agree.
If
not, why the standard committee is very important and people need it?
That's an excellent question. Perhaps someone from the committee would like
to answer it.
AFAIK C99 was a "committee designed animal". Ie the Camel is a horse
designed by a committee :-)
Several high profile committee members have said they wished certain
areas had not been included and that C99 has "lost it's way". The
evidence is that the main compiler vendors have not implemented it.
You have the problem that on the desktop most(?) users use MS compilers.
MS have stopped doing C and do C++.
BTW There is no such language as C/C++. C++ was developed from C90 and
diverged one way whilst C went a different way 95 and C99. So C written
in a C++ compiler is not C.
Most(?) desktop users of C actually use a [MS]C++ compiler and MS has
taken this off on their own direction added to which there is a lot of
use of Java, C# etc and other languages. So there is a lot less interest
in the desktop community to chase the ISO C99 standard that there used
to be when the industry wanted a common specification for the language
and C++ had not arrived.
The embedded community, probably the largest C community there is, is
sticking with C90/5 and not following C99. Most of the embedded world
still use 8 and 16 bit MCU's and most of the embedded standards relate
to C90 anyway.
GNU follows it's own path, though is does have a C90 mode and I think
they are "working towards" C99, but slowly.
In short no one really needed the new features of C99. Some it is
claimed are broken anyway. The maths model for example.
The UK C panel has got a bad reputation over the last few years for
saying "NO!" to adding anything to C99 before fixing some of the major
problems in the standard. In fact there was a suggestion that we Should
go back to C95 and start again! However this has been ignored.
So in my view (and others on the panel but I will let them speak for
themselves) There is a LOT of DR (defect report) work to be done on C99
before we add anything new to C99.
However other panels want to add lots of new things. "Building on
quicksand" as one C panel member said to me. So in my view C99 will
continue to wander off into the wilderness.
ECMA is doing it's own thing with C++ and you are likely to find that
the ISO C++ also goes off into the wilderness in the next few years just
like ISO BASIC.
Somewhere along the line ISO C and C++ have lost their way and I am not
sure how to get them back.
--
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills Staffs England /\/\/\/\/
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ch***@phaedsys. org www.phaedsys.org \/\/\
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