gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (08/21/88)
In article <6280@haddock.ima.isc.com> karl@haddock.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes: >How about the problem with preprocessing numbers, which seems to break the >perfectly valid expression "0xe+N"? Which alternative is the Committee likely >to take: >[a] Fix it, call it a substantive change, and go through another round. >[b] Fix it, but call it an editorial change. >[c] Leave it alone, and expect implementors to ignore the letter of the > Standard in favor of doing what is obviously the right thing. >[d] Leave it alone, and expect users to not write such expressions. >[e] Other ? [c] is out, because we really do intend for conforming implementations to comply with the specifications. [b] seems most likely, assuming nobody at the meeting claims that they really thought the intent was to disallow such expressions. We usually consider fixing a failure of the wording to properly express the committee's intent as "editorial" unless a member objects. >... This would seem to preclude >Common Extension A.6.5.2 in a conforming implementation. I don't think it is promised anywhere that "common extensions" can be accomplished in a conforming implementation. In fact most of them don't seem possible. I've never wanted this section in the Standard..