call to revolt

[J. Horsmeier]

In article <782 at taumet.com> steve at taumet.com (Stephen Clamage) writes:
[...]
>>Hi there, I'll die if casting lvals is going to be illegal...
>
>Sorry your life has to end so soon, but it is not a question of "going
>to be illegal", but "has always been illegal."  This rule is in K&R 1,
>so it is nothing that the ANSI committee added out of sadism.  It is just
>that many compilers failed to enforce the rule.
[...]
>Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve at taumet.com

Hi there, 

I know, I know, you're absolutely right, and normally I don't diddle
code like I showed in my reply.
And I won't die either ... but, currently I am working on an interface
between *very* old C code and loads of FORTRAN stuff and I want to finish
this project asap. To plough through all this f*ckin' code makes my
mind go nuts, and invites one to fiddle/diddle these dirty tricks.

I know it's all *absolutely* non-portable, it's dirty and should not be done,
but I don't care in this particular case, I just want the thing up and running
on just one type of machine, and these kinda tricks allow me to hack things
together. 

I don't want to make a thread out of this, but I won't change my opinion
about the `you get what you deserve' philosophy. 
I like it, if I deserve non-portability, I want to get non-portability. 
If I deserve segmentation violations, I want to get segmentation violations. 
It's my own choice. I don't want any committee to forbid things like that 
in any language. A language is supposed to be a tool to express yourself, 
the way you want and like to do so :-) Restricting syntactic and/or semantic
richness of a language, just to avoid potential abuse by some zomby woofs
from outer space is bad practice IMHO :-)

See ya!

Jos

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|O   J.A. Horsmeier AND Software B.V.        phone : +31 10 4367100   O|
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