[Bug c/16622] [C99] extern inline is handled wrong in C99 mode

["jsm at polyomino dot org dot uk" <gcc-bugzilla at gcc dot gnu dot org>]

------- 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 
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/TechReports/UCAM-CL-TR-453.pdf> (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.



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http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16622