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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: ANSI C and POSIX (was Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada)
Date: 1996/04/08
Message-ID: <dewar.829012748@schonberg>#1/1
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references: <JSA.96Feb16135027@organon.com> <dewar.828757752@schonberg>
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organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.edu
Date: 1996-04-08T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

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.