Ross Ridge wrote:
I completely disagree. Standards should primarily standardize existing
practice, not inventing new features. New features should be created
by people who actually want and will use the features, not by some
disinterested committee.
First of all, I think you mean uninterested and not disinterested,
indeed the ideal is that all committee members *should* be
disinterested, though this is not always the case.
But in fact I disagree fundamentally,
GCC has always been a place for experimenting with new features. Many of
the new features in C99 had already been implemented GCC. Even in the
cases where C99 standardized features differently, I think both GCC and
Standard C benefited from the work done in GCC.
The history for C here does not apply to C++ in my opinion. Adding new
features to a language like C++ is at this stage highly non-trivial in
terms of getting a correct formal definition.
Ross Ridge
