[TUHS] Misguided standsads (was What UNIX Artifacts Are Still Missing?)

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Fri Dec 8 00:28:24 AEST 2017


> 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



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