RE: The Fastest Route to C99?

["Scott Robert Ladd" <scott at coyotegulch dot com>]

>From Joseph S. Myers:
> > Is anyone specific coordinating C99 compliance?
>
> No.  I haven't had time for doing much on it lately.  I think the table in
> <http://gcc.gnu.org/c99status.html> is accurate, but the notes below it
> haven't been updated for changes in how <float.h> is handled.

I've noted that much of the online GNU documentation is out-of-date; for
example, glibc's main page still claims that the current version is 2.2.5.

> (Of course I don't know whether anyone has contracted any of the
> companies doing GCC development to complete the C99
> implementation.)

And here I'd been told that free software was the work of charitable
individuals who gave of their time... err.. freely. Note tongue planted
firmly in cheek :)

The same principle holds true of my Jisp library for Java; it gets upgraded
as clients pay me to add extensions. It's too bad number crunching doesn't
have a lot of benefactors. The only programmers who seem to care about
numbers are Fortranners (of which I'm one).

On the other hand, a love of numbers will probably keep Fortran alive for a
very long time. Am I pessimistic to think that C99 is unlikely to be
completely implemented in the mainstream?

> The glibc status is documented in the CONFORMANCE file distributed with
> glibc, though that may be out of date (I haven't checked it against glibc
> 2.3).  For an outside view of glibc's status, and criticisms thereof, see
> recent discussions on the libc-alpha list.

I'll check into it.

> Ask Stephen Moshier for the latest version of his patches towards the C99
> pragmas.  There was a lot more that needed to be done (e.g. getting the
> pragma status attached to expressions as they pass through trees and RTL)
> but they should be a useful starting point, including some testcases.

Thanks for the pointer.

..Scott