Yeah that’s what I mean by strictly. Does your implementation take shortcuts or does it hold itself to a higher standard and not do that? Does it only use available memory as the ultimate limit?
replyA lot of specs contain these optional limitations. The C standard allowed implementations to truncate variable names to 31 characters if they have external linkage and 63 if internal linkage. Would you be happy if your implementation actually does that? Of course not. Neither LLVM nor GCC does that. That’s because people writing compilers also hold themselves to a higher standard. Now imagine this kind of attitude being pervasive.
I don't get your argument here. You say Haskell conforms strictly to the spec and that's a good thing, okay. But then if the C spec allows for truncated names, a compiler could strictly follow the spec and truncate names. So strictly following the spec is not in fact the whole story
replyYeah very sorry for the confusion. I should not have used the word strictly. I explained my definition of strictly in the above comment and it’s not really strictly in the dictionary sense. I apologize for my bad writing.
replyWhich C standard? ANSI C? C99?
reply