draft ANSI standard: a "conforming program" could be anything

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1383 at hoptoad.uucp> gnu at hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>...  The purpose of the standard is portability, not making
>programs feel good about themselves.  I don't get the bit about
>fighting chances and powerful programs, either...

"The" purpose is putting it a bit strong.  One way to enhance
portability would be to emasculate the language.  Much of the
wording about conformance is intended to accommodate the idea
of implementation-specific extensions and/or coding practices,
in order to protect C's sometime r^ole as a systems language.
You may note in various places in the draft that "conforming
program" (the weaker term) is used to cover programs that are
not strictly portable, in order to guarantee constraints on an
ANSI-compliant compiler when compiling such code.  Such wording
probably deserves careful checking to make sure that the right
term is used, and the definitions or the rationale perhaps need
more work (they've been revised several times already; this
fine degree of legalism seems hard to get just right).