Hi Larry, On Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 04:17:48PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > Looking forward to that--those should have been in libc in the 1980s! I > > Well, not since 1980, but BitKeeper has had all that stuff for 20-25 years: > > https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/master/src/libc/style.h
I'm amazed how libc implementations have not added these things in such a long time. ANSI C brought good and bad things, and this freezing was one of the bad ones. I'm also amazed how a large amount of programmers will continue using strcmp(3) raw instead of adding their own trivial wrappers. Code doesn't become less portable by defining useful macros and functions. > > Heh! There's still people in the C Committee that doesn't like them. > > There are people on the C committee that shouldn't be there. No smiley. Agree. And that goes both ways. I think there's people that should be there and isn't. More specifically, I think there should be representation of the civilized world (glibc, musl, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and POSIX). I understand you can't ask much of volunteers, but I think at least one maintainer of each of those projects should participate in the committee. I think what they're doing now, which is not innovating due to fears of collision with the committee, and taking blindly almost everything that the committee produces, is harmful to the language. Either they should be in the committee, or if they truly believe the committee has lost its mind, they should sit together in a table, and fork C into POSIX C, ignoring anything produced by the WG14. Have a lovely day! Alex -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es> Use port 80 (that is, <...:80/>).
