Re: Namelist Internal Read

From: James Giles (jamesgiles_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 03/29/05 

Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 23:39:00 GMT

Walt Brainerd wrote:
> gary.l.scott@lmco.com wrote:
>
>> I've also never quite understood the need for the quirky &.../
>> syntax.
>
> It's the same reason as the inconsistent names for
> the bit intrinsics. I am not sure where namelist
> came from originally, but probably some vendor did
> it many years ago and some individual thought up
> what seemed like a neat scheme at the time.
>
> When it came up for standardization, "existing
> practice" was picked, rather than a nicer design.

Actually, I don't think the standard adopted the same syntax as
any of the prior existing implementations. Maybe. But it's
different from the several I used before (each different from
the others as well). If they adopted "existing practice" for
this, I don't know what implementation they got it from.

> [Take note, ye who complain that the standards
> committee never adopts existing practice.]

The purpose of adopting existing practice is to avoid pitfalls
of features. A feature defined from scratch with which no one
has experience is more likely to have subtle faults and unexpected
interactions with the rest of the language. Further , such a feature
may not even be needed: since there is no body of experience,
there is no way to estimate whether a majority (or even more
than a tiny minority) would even find it useful. 

-- 
J. Giles
"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software
design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously
no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated
that there are no obvious deficiencies."   --  C. A. R. Hoare

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