Is C99 C?

[spinoza1111]

Spinoza is pure troll.  Trying to correct a pure troll is an utter
waste of time.

Of course it is irresistable, if the troll is talented enough.  For
instance, I have responded to Scott Nudds, Spinoza, and JSH.  So I
cannot castigate anyone for responding to spinoza.

Asking spinoza to halt personal attacks is like asking Nudds or JSH to
stop posting personal attacks.  Quite frankly, in spinozas case, his
only purpose in posting is that of personal attacks.

I have said this before, and I'll say it again. The structure of the
medium which hides through the sheer number of posts their cause and
effect relationships has consistently, in my experience over 20 years,
concealed the behavior of posters who make unnecessary, uncalled-for,
unprofessional and wounding comments on minor errors, matters of
opinion and use of an ill-understood and therefore rote terminology,
and to whom the persons attacked naturally respond if they have
courage and decency.

The result is that 99% of the time a person is condemned for flaming,
he is found to be the flamee in the first instance, and has merely
tried to defend himself. Almost no poster is called to account here
for deliberately STARTING a campaign of personal destruction. In
almost all cases, the victims are blamed since they generate the later
and more visible posts!

At this point, however, my main purpose is indeed getting rid of
Heathfield owing to the fact that he's initiated far too many such
campaigns while seeming to appear neutral and even well-spoken.

 

[Tom St Denis]

Misbehaving? What is this, kindergarten?

Act like a child ...

Such childish language creates a race to be the Parent, and this
CREATES endless flame wars and bullying.

Only in your mind is there a "winner" of USENET. The rest of us are
just trying to discuss the C language with others in a civil back and
forth manner. There is no winner, no loser.

<snip>

Do you have a clc question or comment?

Tom

 

[Keith Thompson]

ANYWHERE, which tells you what "C" means.

[...]

Yes, there is.  It's called ISO/IEC 9899:1999.  (Cue long and boring
argument about whether ISO has the authority to define what "C" is;
the point is that there most certainly is a standard that tells you
what "C" means.)

It's highly imprecise though. Since there are multiple compilers out
in common use which comply to different standards it's not really
meaningful to tell me you code in C. I mean if you wrote a program in
1992 which complied with C90 but not C99, is it no longer a C program?

I think the standard refers to C99 as "C" out a matter of convenience
not to replace "C" everywhere for all time with C99.

Replacing "C" everywhere with C99 (not for all time, but until the
next version of the standard is published) is *exactly* what the
ISO C99 standard intends to do. See paragraph 5 of the Foreword:

This second edition cancels and replaces the first edition,
ISO/IEC 9899:1990, as amended and corrected by ISO/IEC
9899/COR1:1994, ISO/IEC 9899/AMD1:1995, and ISO/IEC
9899/COR2:1996.

[snip]

 

[Tom St Denis]

[...]> C does not mean C90 or C89 or even C99.  There is no standard,
ANYWHERE, which tells you what "C" means.
[...]
Yes, there is.  It's called ISO/IEC 9899:1999.  (Cue long and boring
argument about whether ISO has the authority to define what "C" is;
the point is that there most certainly is a standard that tells you
what "C" means.)

It's highly imprecise though.  Since there are multiple compilers out
in common use which comply to different standards it's not really
meaningful to tell me you code in C.  I mean if you wrote a program in
1992 which complied with C90 but not C99, is it no longer a C program?

I think the standard refers to C99 as "C" out a matter of convenience
not to replace "C" everywhere for all time with C99.

Replacing "C" everywhere with C99 (not for all time, but until the
next version of the standard is published) is *exactly* what the
ISO C99 standard intends to do.  See paragraph 5 of the Foreword:

    This second edition cancels and replaces the first edition,
    ISO/IEC 9899:1990, as amended and corrected by ISO/IEC
    9899/COR1:1994, ISO/IEC 9899/AMD1:1995, and ISO/IEC
    9899/COR2:1996.

[snip]

I think my point though is that ISO doesn't get to define what "C"
means. They defined a spec commonly known as C90 and C99, but "C"
existed long before C90 was adopted as common place.

More so, the section you quoted merely states that the previous ISO
spec is being deprecated in favour of the new one. It doesn't mean
that C == C99 is mandatory or even necessary.

Finally, it's not practical to call C90 applications anything but C
applications.

Tom

 

[Tom St Denis]

Tom St Denis said:



Actually, it does.

If you enter into a legal agreement with another party for one of you
to provide the other with C code (without specifying what you both
mean by "C"), and if there is a subsequent disagreement about what
"C" means, and if that disagreement ends up in court, the judge is
very very very likely indeed to take the view that ISO's definition
is - well, definitive.

Oh agreed, our specs we send out here say we're a C90 shop. My
experience is most customers would be pissed if we were a C99 shop.

Think of it as "de jure" C. De facto C is something else.

My point is if you're at the pub talking with your mate about some C
code you're working on they probably won't assume you're using
variable sized arrays, // comments, local variables (for (int a =
0; ...)), or whatever other new additions there are...

Tom

 

[jameskuyper]

[...]> C does not mean C90 or C89 or even C99. There is no standard,
ANYWHERE, which tells you what "C" means. ....
It's highly imprecise though. Since there are multiple compilers out
in common use which comply to different standards it's not really
meaningful to tell me you code in C. I mean if you wrote a program in
1992 which complied with C90 but not C99, is it no longer a C program?

It's no worse than using the name "James Kuyper" to describe a person
who is very different now than I was when that name was first used to
describe me. Use "C" to refer to any one of several different
languages that have been referred to by that name over the last
several decades; use C90 or C99 or K&R C to refer to particular
languages in that set. Ambiguously, you should also be able to use "C"
to refer to the language described by the most recently approved
version of the standard.

The C standard nowhere uses the term C99, or anything like it. The
closest equivalent that it does use is "ISO/IEC 9899:1999", the C99
standard's own name. If "C" was meant to be taken as shorthand for
some other, longer, term, the standard would have said so at least
once; it does not.

Replacing "C" everywhere with C99 (not for all time, but until the
next version of the standard is published) is *exactly* what the
ISO C99 standard intends to do. See paragraph 5 of the Foreword:

This second edition cancels and replaces the first edition,
ISO/IEC 9899:1990, as amended and corrected by ISO/IEC
9899/COR1:1994, ISO/IEC 9899/AMD1:1995, and ISO/IEC
9899/COR2:1996.

[snip]

I think my point though is that ISO doesn't get to define what "C"
means.

They have that authority as far as ISO is concerned. ISO itself has no
enforcement powers (that I'm aware of, anyway), so everyone else can
use the work "C" to refer to whatever they want it to refer to, but
there is indeed a standard that defines what "C" means.

 

[Nick Keighley]

Tom St Denis wrote:


They have that authority as far as ISO is concerned. ISO itself has no
enforcement powers (that I'm aware of, anyway),

ah so you havn't heard of the ISO Standards Enforcement Team?
Programmers everywhere quake when they hear the rattle of the
ISET's Cosmic Black helicopters.

Using a // comment in a C89 prgram can get you 10yrs in Camp
Hexadecimal

 

[Nick Keighley]

Nick Keighley wrote:

K&R C, is deader than Latin.

I made a change to a K&R C program only a few weeks ago.
I assure you K&R C programs do do useful work.

 

[Richard Bos]

I made a change to a K&R C program only a few weeks ago.
I assure you K&R C programs do do useful work.

Verum, sed lingua Latina quoque non iam mortuus. Nescio K&R C plus vel
minus mortuus esse quam Latinam.

Richard

 

[Tom St Denis]

Usenet trolls are the weirdest.

Truth is most of them are just punks that if you met in real life face
to face would STFU and GBTW. The problem with the net in creating
vast distances is that it seems to empower people to fly off the
handle and say stuff that you wouldn't even say to an 18th century
sailor.

 

[Keith Thompson]

On 2009-08-04 09:23:29 -0600, spinoza1111 <[email protected]> said: [74 lines deleted]

You try way too hard to sound smart.

If you must reply to trolls, can you at least not quote the entire
article?

 

[Default User]

Usenet trolls are the weirdest.

Any chance we could get you to quit feeding them?




Brian

 

[luserXtrog]

It's just weird how so many Usenet newsgroups, even ones about
technical topics like a programming language, inevitably contain one or
more posters who write bizarre, wordy monologues about their arch
nemesis, as if anyone asked or cared.  It's even weirder that someone
would have no life to the point that they would actually have an online
arch nemesis and maintain a personal quest to defeat them.  Usenet is
like a blog for the insane.

But wouldn't it be nice to have a good enemy to keep you on your toes?
I'd prefer that to a sycophant 6 days out of 7.

I'm starting to like Keith and Richard more and more,
particularly when one of them issues a firm pronouncement
or dissection, gloriously cutting to the chase, taking no prisoners.

 

[Kenny McCormack]

On 2009-08-04 09:23:29 -0600, spinoza1111 <[email protected]> said: [74 lines deleted]

You try way too hard to sound smart.

If you must reply to trolls, can you at least not quote the entire
article?

Get a life!

Seriously, Kiki, for all our sakes...

 

[spinoza1111]

So what are you doing here? Perhaps it's just a communications tool
for a spectrum of souls, most of whom lead damaged lives owing to
capitalism.

The computer programmer who shot those women today is not some
outlier. He's a person like you or me who is isolated by capitalism,
and who has failed to manage his anger.

The people who shout here oudest here about "trolls" and "weirdos"
make a big mistake, in my view, when they call my syntax twisted,
because it isn't. And, these people are the likeliest to be
dysfunctional because to them, "if only" there weren't so many
"trolls" (or Jews, or uppity blacks, or Palestinians), and "if only"
everybody memorized the C99 book as they have, THEN everything would
be great.

It's from THIS population of statistically to-date "normal, regular
guys" that the murderers come, not from known and registered weirdos
like me, or Musatov...where I'm a weirdo because I'm literate and can
code, and Musatov is strange for different reasons.

This has been proven again and again. All murder-suicides, or suicides
by cop, where some guy shoots people at random and then is killed or
shoots himself, are, by definition, first-time efforts. Ever since
Charles Whitman, the University of Texas shooter, most of these mass-
murderers are "regular guys"...from Whitman to Ted Bundy. Lee Harvey
Oswald was normal UNTIL his onset in 1961 when he started stalking
right-wing pols.

Furthermore, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has shown that ordinary German men
carried out the *Einsatzgruppen* operations and, alongside some real
wacks, ran the death camps.

People here don't want to face this, and the result are campaigns of
personal destruction.

Wystan Hugh Auden faced his and others' demons when on Sept 11, 1939,
he admitted that what "mad Nijinksy" wrote of Serge Diaghalev was true
of the normal heart.

Therefore, I think you are making a destructive unified Concept out of
the spectrum of people here, some of whom may indeed obsess about
bullshit and hobby-horses, and others of whom may have genuine
concerns or an honest style orthogonal to others.

 

[spinoza1111]

On 2009-08-04 09:23:29 -0600,spinoza1111<[email protected]> said: [74 lines deleted]
You try way too hard to sound smart.

So hard that perhaps I am smart. I wonder if you could tell the
difference between "sounding smart" and actually being smart, to the
extent that being able to express concepts is such a large part of
being a smart bastard...even in, perhaps especially in, programming.

But the ability to be articulate about programming is so rare that it
attracts a great deal of hostility, a twisted hostility with a nasty
sexual component, that emerges in the campaigns against Herbert
Schildt and Jacob Navia (and myself) here, and in the hatred spewed at
Java author Kathy Sierra. All of these people can write whereas more
programmers are like Heathfield, who can only point in the directions
of solutions they can neither properly explain nor justify, save in a
canned way.

When these people defend themselves, it's like the courtroom scene,
and other episodes, in Mike Judge's film Idiocracy: the Trogdolytes in
that film use the fact that they don't understand, a fact which they
perceive, against the hated outlier, saying "you talk like a fag and
you're shit's all fucked up".

Heathfield has mastered a corporate writing style in which known
problems are assumed to be solved because they are neatly listed and
identified, in which it's a potential career ender to disruptively
solve any one of them, and in which a large part of knowledge consists
of unresolved doubts. Applied to personalities, this becomes not a
person's known bad acts (including his personal brutality and lack of
collegiality) but his potential to be uninformed about technical
developments or a coder of bugs.

Many underqualified programmers believe that truly gifted programmers
express themselves poorly, but this isn't true at the top as opposed
to being Lead Programmer in some dump of an auto-parts company. Many
underqualified programmers hope that code will kill both mathematical
formalism and human language so that they can join the living dead
once and for all and we can all code vending machines in C until
everything goes to shit.

Get a life!

Seriously, Kiki, for all our sakes...

Indeed.

 

[Keith Thompson]

On 2009-08-05 11:33:05 -0600, Keith Thompson <[email protected]> said: [...]

If you must reply to trolls, can you at least not quote the entire
article?

Pretty sure I'll quote whatever I want to make a point. You'll survive.

Yes, I will.

PLONK.

 

[Default User]

Nope.

Good to know, thanks. I know what to do from there.




Brian

 

[user923005]

Rebirth of Stephan Wilms and the 'campaign against grumpyness'

You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

 

[Default User]

Rebirth of Stephan Wilms and the 'campaign against grumpyness'

You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

Tain't always easy, that's for sure. But this is a personal campaign. I
was getting a bit too hair-triggered in some newsgroups.




Brian