9fans archive / 2007 / 04 / 581 /    prev next

From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@nul...>
Subject: Re: [9fans] speaking of kenc
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 08:29:12 GMT

"erik quanstrom" <quanstro@cor...> wrote in message 
news:9ce51c75b076ab51a54e2c0352417143@cor......
> good point.  except, dennis was mostly ignored.
> why should mortals expect different results?

To the extent that Dennis provided input to the C standards effort,
he was certainly not ignored!  Indeed, sizeof(char)==1 and
restrict instead of noalias were both direct responses to his input.

> i also don't understand your defence of _Bool.  why
> add a type that behaves in a nonstandard manner?

It is just an arithmetic type with width at least 1, and
conversion rules aimed at maximizing its Boolean nature.

It is a pity that the result of relational expressions (for
example) cannot be Boolean, for reasons of historical
compatibility, but that's not the fault of _Bool (or plain
"bool" as it is meant to be used via <stdbool.h>).

> why would a typedef- or enum-based boolean type
> fail to serve this purpose, assuming one is convinced
> of the need for a boolean type.

There are a number of possible solutions.  _Bool and
<stdbool.h> were selected as the best proposal under
the existing constraints (don't break all the existing code
already using typedef int bool, allow C++ compatibility,
etc.).