Re: Required Metrics

["Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org>]

"Robert Dewar" <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:8es60q$5fm$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> In article <8emkv7$uf6$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
>
> > > Alternate phrasing of the question: If a requirement is in
> the
> > > standard, and no one makes an effort to follow it, what's
> the
> > > requirement doing in the standard? Why not have an
> interpretation that
> > > says, in essence: "Oops. Never mind"? Or am I just missing
> some
> > > fundamental point here?
>
>
> Well of course, this should be the point of view. And indeed
> properly following that point of view would have avoided all
> the meaningless documentation requirements in the RM.
>
> The ARG does in fact sometimes decide that things that look
> like requirements in the RM are meaningess. For instance we
> recently discovered that the Suppress (.., On=> ...) form
> of this pragma is completely meaningless, and the language
> in the standard is bogus -- compilers do different things,
> and what appears like a requirement is in fact in practice
> a statement that this feature is completely implementation
> dependent.

So, why are some meaningless requirements addressed by the ARG, and others
not?

(By the way, I think I was the one to make the comment quoted at the top,
not Ted Dennison, although by the end I may wish it had been someone else :)