Re: Cray C-90 (UNICOS 8.0.3) support?

[haahr@netcom.com (Paul Haahr)]

> > (I don't see how Cray can say they ship ANSI C while imposing
> > these restrictions, but I'm not in the supercomputer business.)

> These restrictions are straight out of the ANSI C standard. I'd have to check
> the rationale for why they were put in. It made sense at the time though.

I'm amazed.  I hadn't realized that it was quite so restricted, but I
just checked and you're right.

The reason, of course, is that it makes it easier to implement.  Same
with the ``non-volatile variables may be clobbered'' brain damage.  Who
would want to specify a programming language containing features that
are harder to implement than the things everyone learned in their
sophomore compiler class.  (cf Dick Gabriel's _Worse is Better_.)

To be fair, I've taken that dodge on things like exposing globbing in
es or opening up the parser, but restricting how you can call setjmp
seems a little extreme.

Paul