Goals of X3J11 (was Re: directory handling in ansi C)

[Henry Spencer]

In article <481 at mwtech.UUCP> martin at mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel) writes:
>Following the discussion up to this point, I don't want to continue,
>but I whished the committee had left out the C-stdlib completly on the
>first run and later defined this item in several subsets, to which the
>C-implementations could seperatly conform (or not).

The trouble is, if you have N optional packages that are part of the
standard, then you have 2^N different "standard" languages.  COBOL tried
this.  Looking at the results of that experience was, I believe, one of
the things that influenced X3J11 in its decision to avoid that approach
and try to produce *one* standard.

(Actually they ended up with a standard and a "freestanding" subset, but
that's close enough and there were good reasons for it.)

For all practical purposes the more basic library functions are part of
the language.
-- 
That's not a joke, that's      |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
NASA.  -Nick Szabo             | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu