From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID,
	REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: 103376,6bf9d4ba0cfd8cb6
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)
Subject: Re: Announce: OpenToken 2.0 released
Date: 2000/02/09
Message-ID: <2000Feb9.172557.1@eisner>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 583861000
References: <3890C62B.18309585@telepath.com>
 <t7n1plq56s.fsf@calumny.jyacc.com> <876unj$jcs$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
 <t790146b69.fsf@calumny.jyacc.com> <87d7qck6pm.fsf@deneb.cygnus.argh.org>
 <t71z6pf46c.fsf@calumny.jyacc.com> <wcc4sbimred.fsf@world.std.com>
 <t7bt5qrsgj.fsf@calumny.jyacc.com>
X-Trace: news.decus.org 950135161 7102 KILGALLEN [216.44.122.34]
Organization: LJK Software
Reply-To: Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 2000-02-09T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <t7bt5qrsgj.fsf@calumny.jyacc.com>, Hyman Rosen <hymie@prolifics.com> writes:
> Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com> writes:
>> But "char" in C is just the smallest integer type.  There's no reason to
>> believe that reading a "char" has anything to do with characters/text,
>> despite its misleading name.
> 
> The C/C++ stream interface concerns itself with reading characters
> from input streams. The char type is able to hold any character
> read from a stream. This discussion is about how input functions
> can provide end-of-file notification. One way is to have an
> out-of-band value returned by the single-character reader function.
> The C way of doing this is to have the return type of that function
> be int. It is then the case that if the implementation has int and
> char the same size, and the input format is such that every possible
> bit pattern for char may be present, then this out-of-band method
> will not work, and one of the available alternate methods must be
> used, such as fread or feof. This situation is rare, and may even be
> non-existent.
> 
> Do you feel that your comment has contributed anything to this
> discussion? To me it seems to be a snide and pointless attack on C.

I have no particular use for C, but I viewed the discussion more as
a useful reminder about the dangers of in-band signalling.  Phone
companies learned that years ago, and today they use the SS7 protocol.