Newsgroups: comp.std.c++
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: design by committee (was: templates and exceptions in g++?)
Message-ID: <1990Nov23.211727.2802@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1016@zinn.MV.COM>
Date: Fri, 23 Nov 90 21:17:27 GMT

In article <1016@zinn.MV.COM> mjv@objects.mv.com (Michael J. Vilot) writes:
>...there seems to be sincere desire to do better than trigraphs as a way to
>satisfy the legitimate needs of national character sets.

I would have hoped that X3J16 would not be re-hashing all the dumb ideas
that X3J11 carefully considered and carefully rejected for good reasons.
However, given that Bjarne was one of the handful of people pushing this
specific dumb idea, I suppose I should have expected it...

The right answer to national character sets is ISO Latin 1 or equivalent,
not ridiculous contortions in language syntax that *every* compiler
*everywhere* then has to be able to parse.  Trigraphs were a mistake.

Remind me to submit a proposal to X3J16 to change C++ so that it can be
typed using only the intersection of a Model 26 keypunch and an ASR-33.

>The availability of templates and exceptions has a substantial impact on how I
>design libraries in C++.  I would hope that the library portion of the C++ 
>standard would make the best use of the language.  Yet we have little ``prior
>art'' in libraries using these features ...

Hmm.  Now that is a sticky problem.  I fear the obvious answer is to try to
produce upward-compatible extensions, so that existing code works but newer
code can take advantage of the new facilities.  Awkward.  See what you get
when you start adding language features? :-) :-) :-)

This sort of thing actually did come up a little bit in the C library, for
example in the type of the parameter to ctime().  X3J11 opted not to mess
with historical practice.  But they weren't facing a problem anywhere
near the size of this one.
-- 
"I'm not sure it's possible            | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
to explain how X works."               |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry
