Re: Possible variadic macro bug

[Zack Weinberg <zack at codesourcery dot com>]

On Fri, Nov 09, 2001 at 06:02:21PM -0600, Peter Seebach wrote:
> >The syntax you thought worked conflicts with GCC's extension for giving
> >the variable arguments a friendly name, which is widely used, so I hope
> >the committee didn't mean to do that. :-)
> 
> We didn't have any GNU C people available.

This is a continuing problem.  Speaking only for myself, I'd like to
participate in C standardization, but it's not at all clear how.  My
impression is that one must be a member of one's national body (which
is not cheap) even to join the WG14 mailing list.

And I could probably afford to pay dues, but I don't know who to talk
to about it.

> >The revised ",##__VA_ARGS__" extension in gcc 3.0 was meant to be suitable
> >for standardization (unlike the older version, which was awful and I'm
> >embarrassed it survived as long as it did).  In fact, if I knew how, I
> >would have written up a formal proposal already.  Perhaps you can shed
> >some light on the procedure?
> 
> You contact your national body (ANSI, in the U.S., or the British standards
> organization, in the UK) and ask them to submit a Defect Report.  Actually,
> this looks like a friendly enough extension to me that I might be able to
> submit a DR on it and get it accepted as correcting an unfortunate limitation.

If you'd like I can write up both the "friendly name for __VA_ARGS__"
and the "delete trailing comma with ##" extensions in DR format and send
them to you.

> I just wish someone had caught it *before* the standard went out.  Hmm.

If I remember correctly it did come up in late '98 on comp.std.c and no
one took it particularly seriously (which is normal for discussions there).

zw