On Nov 24, 2004, at 12:06 PM, Van Snyder wrote: > Of course, it was an extension. Being so, X3J3 never standardized it, > perhaps because of the resistance to standardizing existing practice. That hyperbole seems a bit, harsh. Close to the point of being flame bait. In well over a decade on J3, I never once heard even a hint of a single member suggesting that being existing practice was a reason not to standardize something. I don't think it was because my ears were closed. I have certainly heard plenty of arguments that being existing practice was not in itself always sufficient reason to standardize something. But that statement is very different. In fact, it is opposite in sign. One statement argues that existing practice is a negative. The other acknowledges it as a positive, but not necessarily sufficiently positive to outweigh other negatives. There are always negatives to every proposal. If nothing else, every proposal requires dome work, which is a negative. Might not be a big negative, and how big is often debatable, but the sign is obvious enough. Sometimes the positive of existing practice has been strong enough to overcome substantial negatives. For example, to my knowledge, existing practice is the main reason that the bit intrinsics look quite like they do. I seriously doubt that they would have had quite the same syntax if it were not for the weight of existing practice. There have been cases where multiple existing practices were inconsistent on details. In several such cases, the standard did avoid conflicting with either of the old ones. But that is done specifically to *SUPPORT* existing practice by continuing to allow it as an alternative extension form, rather than by dictating one choice that would invalidate existing codes using one of the incompatible existing practices. I've been involved in a few of those. (Command-line arguments come to mind). Of course I've seen a lot of proposals to standardize some existing feature from some compiler. Many of those proposals got rejected. Many proposals of all kinds get rejected (there being orders of magnitude more proposals than are practical to do, and some proposals directly conflicting with others). But never once has the fact that it was existing practice been even hinted at as a reason for rejection. Yes, I'm including internal committee discussions, and even private ones over dinner, so no, I don't buy any theory that involves that as being the real reason behind the scene. But all in all, what I've seen most of along these lines is people whose proposals got rejected making up what I can only categorize as conspiracy theories to explain the rejection. The hypothesized basis of the conspiracy varies, prejudice against existing practice being one. -- Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience; [log in to unmask] | experience comes from bad judgment. | -- Mark Twain