Paul Schauble <Schauble@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA> (12/23/84)
Has the standard committee considered making a multi-level standard,
like COBOL?
I can see much virtue in a two-level standard,
1. Regular C, as described in K&R
2. Full C, including long identifiers (internal and external), structure
assign and function return, enumeration types, etc.
This solves the political problem of allowing older C compilers to be
"standard" but still describes a higher level language.
Comments??
Paulhenry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (12/29/84)
> Has the standard committee considered making a multi-level standard, > like COBOL? The committee discussed this very early, and rejected it. As Bill Plauger pointed out, the existence of roughly a dozen optional modules in COBOL means that there are about 4096 different "standard" COBOLs. This seems a poor example to emulate. Even Fortran (77) is only two languages. I'm not sure whether they rejected multiple versions completely, or decided to try for a single version and add a "subset" version if it was really necessary. In any event, they obviously didn't see any sufficiently-dire need. Personally, I agree with them. The farthest one should go is to admit a lesser version which is officially stigmatized by declaring it to be a "subset" version. And I don't see any major need for this in C. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry