From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 18094 invoked by alias); 8 Aug 2004 23:42:33 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gcc-bugs-help@gcc.gnu.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: Sender: gcc-bugs-owner@gcc.gnu.org Received: (qmail 18086 invoked by alias); 8 Aug 2004 23:42:33 -0000 Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2004 23:42:00 -0000 Message-ID: <20040808234233.18085.qmail@sourceware.org> From: "jsm at polyomino dot org dot uk" To: gcc-bugs@gcc.gnu.org In-Reply-To: <20040718224725.16622.pinskia@gcc.gnu.org> References: <20040718224725.16622.pinskia@gcc.gnu.org> Reply-To: gcc-bugzilla@gcc.gnu.org Subject: [Bug c/16622] [C99] extern inline is handled wrong in C99 mode X-Bugzilla-Reason: CC X-SW-Source: 2004-08/txt/msg00605.txt.bz2 List-Id: ------- Additional Comments From jsm at polyomino dot org dot uk 2004-08-08 23:42 ------- Subject: Re: [C99] extern inline is handled wrong in C99 mode On Sun, 8 Aug 2004, hozelda at yahoo dot com wrote: > In general, all of these (constant) sizeof rule exceptions are a little annoying in > that they are scattered around when perhaps maybe a new concept should be > introduced (unevaluable expression.. or something like that [(aside) I think the With regard to this as a general point about clarifying the concepts of the standard (and nothing much to do with the subject of this bug report), there are many areas where the explanations given by the C standards in English are perhaps not the best or clearest possible way of explaining the concepts and defining the language. In some places, it may make sense to introduce new concepts, or formalisms, to explain things (sequence points have been an example where several competing formalisms have been produced). In turn, while formalisms make things more precise and help ascertain answers to subtle cases, they can rather reduce the audience who can understand the standard. Have you read Norrish's thesis (imperfectly formalising some aspects of a subset of C90)? Note in particular the comment in chapter 4: This ... tells us nothing about the quality of our semantics with respect to the original specification .... Better would be to have the specification of the semantics inspected by another individual who was both familiar with the fine details of the ISO standard, and the techniques of operational semantics. Unfortunately, such people are hard to find, which is rather an indictment of the divergence between theory and practice in computer science. -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16622