Mark Williams C

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1000 at twwells.uucp> bill at twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
>The ANSI standard applies only to implementations and programs
>claiming conformance to it. Who should care what others do?

Developers of applications care, that's who.  We need a reliable way
of testing for a Standard-conforming implementation.  __STDC__ was
supposed to be the way.

>If you are writing programs that have to check the implementation for
>conformance, you had just better only check for __STD__ == 1.

Unfortunately, vendors of non Standard-conforming C implementations
have already been defining __STDC__ as everything under the sun,
including 1.  This does piss me off...

We went through this discussion a few months ago.  The inevitable
outcome seems to be that, given the lack of vendor restraint
necessary to make __STDC__ serve its intended purpose, application
code has to provide its own arrangements for such configuration
information.  For example, my standard configuration header <std.h>
now includes an appropriate definition of my own macro STD_C which
I use the way that __STDC__ was intended to be used.