call to revolt

[David Rabson]

Until now, I have been content to sit back and ignore the ansi standard
for C.  Trigraphs are amusing -- I'm almost surprised the IBM representatives
on the committee didn't push for including computed gotos as well -- but
most compilers turn them off.  Eliminating the IDENTA/**/IDENTB concatenation
mechanism from the preprocessor was stupid but not enough to make me
post to this group.  (I am aware of the argument that supports the action,
tokenizing compilers, but I am not convinced by it).

Outlawing lvalue casts, however, borders on fascism.  I have yet to see
a pre-ansi compiler that fails to treat properly

		void *thing;
		((int *)thing)++;

(or, if it doesn't know about voids, the same thing with char *thing).  I
realize that some machines might, in principle, have different alignments for
different types of pointers.   A void *, however, I thought, was guaranteed
to obey the most restrictive alignment and hence be castable to any other
pointer.

I hereby invite the black-shirts from the ansi camp to explain their
prejudice against casting lvalues.

The rest of us should stop sitting back and start fighting.  If enough
customers insist on casting lvalues and otherwising ignoring ansi's
meddling in Kernighan's and Ritchie's work, vendors will create
correct, rather than compliant, compilers.

David Rabson
Departments of Physics, University of British Columbia and McMaster University