7 Dec
2017
7 Dec
'17
8:28 p.m.
Standards committees are not filled with altruistic
folks working to
make something great.
Not only in big ways, such as to sway the market. An example from Posix
is the undefined meaning of malloc(0). As I understand it, just one
committee member held out for malloc(0) to be an optional error, thus
confounding a harmless corner case with a fatal error. This nit has
burdened conscientious programmers ever since, all so one company's easily
fixable variant could be grandfathered into compliance.
Doug