draft ANSI standard: are chars signed?

[gnu at hoptoad.UUCP]

In article <783 at nscpdc.NSC.COM>, joemu at nscpdc.NSC.COM (Joe Mueller) writes:
> The committee wanted to "fix" the question of signedness of a char but
> couldn't arrive at an acceptable compromise. We thought about having
> chars be signed and unsigned chars unsigned but we were afraid it would
> break too much code that depended on chars being unsigned. We ended up
> adopting the compromise of:
> 	char	- signed or unsigned, implementation defined
> 	unsigned char
> 	signed char

Of course, this compromise breaks all the code that depends on chars
being EITHER signed OR unsigned!  To be portable and "strictly
conforming", you can't depend on =chars having signs= or =chars having no
signs=, you just can't depend.

I would rather they had broken half the code that makes assumptions,
rather than all of it.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore at lll-crg.arpa
Call +1 800 854 7179 or +1 714 540 9870 and order X3.159-198x (ANSI C) for $65.
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