Re: Reading a line of arbitrary length

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Jon said

<<> One person's "so much more useful" stuff is another person's
> gratuitious rubbish.

Wow.

> to even considering elaborate pattern matching stuff, there are too
> many ways to approach this problem to decree one as standard. Similarly
> for GC, it is clear that there would be no consensus on this addition.

There are "too many" ways to approach a language design to decree any
as standard.  Sounds pretty silly, eh?>>

Not to anyone with any experience in language standardization. You only
want to standardize something if there is reasonable consensus gathered
around one particular approach. If there are many ways of doing something,
and no agreement as to what the best approach is, and substantial argument
about which is the best way, then you really have no basis for a standard.
Sometimes, there can be multiple ways of doing things (e.g. drive on the
right, or drive on the left), but it really does not matter which you choose,
so long as you choose one of the possibilities, since what is important is
that there *is* a standard.

But on anything where there is real disagreement, you can't make progress
often, and you just have to agree that you cannot agree on a standard
in that area.

Jon, I think you would have been *quite* frustrated with the Ada 95
effort (or any other language standardization effort for that matter).
It is not good enough in such an effort to be technically correct, you
have to be able to convince other people to gather behind one particular
approach (hint: resorting to name calling as in "going off half cocked" is
unlikely to succeed as a tactic -- sometimes good technical arguments
succeed, but even there you can find yourself frustrated :-)