New section 3.9.6

Doug Gwyn gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL
Fri Dec 9 17:24:20 AEST 1988


In article <11126 at haddock.ima.isc.com> karl at haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
>IMHO, The Committee should have made the entire construct `f(int x[])'
>obsolescent.  This would still allow the Darnell notation$ to be added to a
>future Standard, if that turns out to be the Right Thing, but it would also
>allow for more ambitious undertakings%.

I think the reason there wasn't sufficient support for that more drastic
step was that a LOT of correctly-written code exists that uses that notation.
Only a small fraction of it would be invalidated were Darnell's semantics
to be implemented, but all of it would be invalidated if support for the
notation were completely dropped.

There are proposals for future addition of array sections etc. to C, but
it would be premature to adopt them into the standard before there is
sufficient experience with them.  I expect several vendors to be working
on this as vendor-supported extensions in the next few years.



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