Re: [dev] Coding style: why /* */ and not //?

From: Markus Wichmann <nullplan_AT_gmx.net>
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2019 06:14:25 +0100

On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 08:11:57PM +0000, sylvain.bertrand_AT_gmail.com wrote:
> Expect POSIX to add significant technical cost over time, like ISO, ANSI,
> the most monstruous being the w3c.

You ever try to write POSIX utilities according to the standard? Believe
me, POSIX of all standards doesn't need to add anything to incur
significant technical cost. Just say "cat -u". I mean, -v is considered
harmful, but what about -u? Considered useless? system() is supposed to
return 127 if the command interpreter could not be launched. That's
mighty specific. cp -i is a thing. Etc. pp.

However, for ISO C it is actually pretty easy to spot MS contributions.
In this case, look at Annex K. C89 contained a lot of badly designed
interfaces in Clause 7, so C95 added a few better designed alternatives
(or bodges on the original design, depending on your view). And then M$
came along and added Annex K, where they added _s to a lot of functions
and said "Use these henceforth. Just go through your code with a
find-and-replace and then sin no more." And nobody, absolutely nobody
bought it. These functions are also badly designed, but for other
reasons than the C89 functions.

Thankfully that whole nonsense is confined to an optional annex of the
standard, that next to nobody implements. M$ does of course, but Visual
Studio is not really relevant when it comes to C implementations. They
still only implement C95, with cherry-picked features from C99, mostly
ones that are also in C++.

Ciao,
Markus
Received on Fri Jan 11 2019 - 06:14:25 CET