🚀 go-pugleaf

Apologies if you see this twice.  I don't think this escaped from Digital
before, and I can no longer abuse Berkeley's daemon to get things posted.

In article <1992Oct30.090310.1@zodiac.rutgers.edu> leichter@zodiac.rutgers.edu writes:
>Without some explicit minimum, it is impossible to write even very simple
>strictly conforming programs.

Of course, it still is impossible.

>Suppose there were no lower limit on include file nesting.
>Or, suppose there were not lower limit on modifiers.

Yeah, but one implementation only has to accept one program that has these
things, and another implementation only has to accept one program that has
these things, and they're most certainly likely to be different programs.
One we have these two conforming implementations, it's impossible to make
a portable program.

>Most standards do include some analogous lower limits.  For example, the
>FORTRAN standard says you must support n-dimensional arrays for n up to
>some limit (8?); you can go higher if you want.  This is directly analogous
>to the C requirement on modifiers.

It is not.  The FORTRAN standard says that EVERY array can have up to 7
dimensions, and a truly conforming implementation has to accept ALL of them,
in ALL conforming programs.  Of course, a truly conforming implementation
is usually impossible because you can usually feed it a large enough source
code to make it run out of memory space.  (I don't think a standard should
specify relative limits on the disk space available to users to edit their
programs in, relative to the swap space available to the compiler :-)
So it still comes down to quality of implementation.  But the FORTRAN
standard doesn't give an escape clause after accepting just 1 program.

>Every language standard I can think of has SOME lower limit on the number of
>significant characters in a variable name.

Funny.  The only language standard I've seen since 1978 that had a limit
was the C standard.  And the 1977 Fortran standard only kept it for
compatibility with the 1966 Fortran standard.  (I haven't seen the later
Fortran standards :-)  But anyway, it is customary now for every character
of every identifier to be significant, with no limit.  Except in C.
--
Norman Diamond       diamond@jit081.enet.dec.com
If this were the company's opinion, I wouldn't be allowed to post it.
"It's been a lovely recession."