my two cents

[David A. Rabson]

I just got my hands on a copy of the second edition of K&R and was
distressed to read that "[string constants] are no longer modifiable,
and so may be placed in read-only memory."

This will cause mktemp() and many, many other things to break.  I hope
the committee will reconsider this: if it stays in the standard,
people who write compilers are going to have to add a compiler option
to turn it off.  More likely, they will keep it off by default.

The purpose of trigraphs is only slightly less opaque.  I remember
there was a discussion of them a few weeks ago, but I read only a
part of it.  I missed any justification for them.  Can anyone name
a computer or operating system that requires trigraphs?  Trigraphs,
too, could cause programs to break, although not so many as the
string-constant nonsense.

I imagine that my complaints at this point are likely to be ignored
by the standards committee, but I hope someone at Sun or AT&T is
listening.

					David Rabson
					davidra at helios.tn.cornell.edu