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From: Bradd W. Szonye <bradds@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: RE: ANSI C and POSIX (was Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada)
Date: 1996/04/19
Message-ID: <01bb2dce.8f2fad80$c6c2b7c7@Zany.localhost>#1/1
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references: <JSA.96Feb16135027@organon.com> <dewar.828757752@schonberg>
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organization: Netcom
x-netcom-date: Fri Apr 19  3:57:42 AM CDT 1996
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.edu
Date: 1996-04-19T03:57:42-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


On Monday, April 08, 1996, Robert Dewar wrote...
> Szu-Wen said
> 
> 
> It's a joke, lighten up ;).
> 
> 
> (referring to his comment about portability of behavior)
> 
> Actually the joke is on you, because the comment you made is not a joke
> at all but instead a very important point, around which a lot of
language
> design decisions focus.
> 
> An obvous goal of any language design is to minimize or eliminate
> undefined and non-deterministic behavior.
> 
> These goals are often not net because of two important considerations:
> 
>  1. Over specifying can lead to inefficient code (e.g. requiring left to
> 	right evaluation)
> 
>  2. Some features (low level bit twiddling, tasking, etc.) may make it
> 	desirable semantically to introduce undefined or ND behavior.
> 
> Debating the compromises here is a major activity of language design.
> 
> 

True, those are goals of language design. However, they're not goals of
language standarization. The goals of *that* are to codify existing
practice. Throughout the C language, if it came to a choice between
breaking existing code or leaving something undefined, ANSI made it
undefined half the time and "implementation-defined" the other half. The
demands of C programmers on the language's efficiency on the local machine
made it harder still to come up with unbreakable rules.

Bradd