🚀 go-pugleaf

On 4 Sep 90 21:18:59 GMT, I wrote, as an aside to a technical discussion:

pcg> Did AT&T want to make it very difficult for anybody but
pcg> themselves produce a conforming implementation? Or at least
pcg> to make it so difficult to understand what a conforming
pcg> implementation is so that people would stick by AT&T's for
pcg> fear of the unknown? If this has been true, it has failed;
pcg> it is well known that cfront is not conforming itself, i.e.
pcg> AT&T have shot themselves in the foot :-).

This seems to have caused offense. I want to state that it was not meant
as other than irony, which I hope was understood. Apologies to any party
that felt this ironic paragraph was serious.

	Another aside on AT&T and standards: somebody once remarked that
	the SVID and its verification suite were designed in places so
	that apparently one *must* copy the AT&T implementation to pass
	it; for example, where multiple error codes could conceivably
	be returned, the SVID or its verification suite would accept as
	conforming only the code returned by System V, thus forcing
	other implementations to perform certain tests in the same order
	as the System V one. This was suspected to be a ploy to defeat
	cloners, and not sloppyness on the part of the authors of the
	SVID or its verification suite. It happened that eventually in
	parts the System V implementation evolved, other codes were
	returned, and thus *System V would fail to be certified as SVID
	conforming*. Now, this shows that probably, like in all large
	organizations, the left hand does not know what the right hand
	is doing, and this is often a more credible explanation than
	conspiracy theories. However the story has a moral: those who
	did not believe that AT&T had just been sloppy took issue from
	this, and founded the OSF, to ensure an "open process", not
	just an "open specification", which they believed could be
	tweaked. This is the one point on which the fact that now C++
	is going to be ANSIfied is a win -- I would otherwise be
	confident that Stroustrup and his colleagues would do a better
	job, but (in the eyes of the conspiracy theorists) an "open
	process" is better, even if it leads to design-by-committee.

The point of the irony was to (as is usual for me) show the dangers of
complexity; with any work that is complicated enough and still evolving,
even the organization to which its designer belongs has difficulty
keeping up with it. There is no need to invoke conspiracy theories,
except to make irony.

I hope (against all past experience) that the ANSIfication, which after
all benefits from the work of Stroustrup, Shopiro, etc..., as well as
many others, will make the language ever *simpler*, and thus ever more
accessible, to any user and any implementor, including AT&T's :-).
--
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk