in the fiction of your mind
> Perhaps worth noting that a lot of this gcc quirkiness (and, via peer
> pressure, clang quirkiness) was spawned in response to overly brittle
> copyright laws and enforcement. (The expiration times have been
> extended excessively to satisfy the likes of Disney, and the
> enforcement seems to necessarily be focussed on stupid issues and most
> people tend to be uninformed about the nature and character of the
> laws and issues.)
>
> To avoid the specter of copyright being enforced on computer software
> (where the code tends to closely follow the spec), the gcc maintainers
> (fsf and whoever else rms managed to recruit to that cause). adopted a
> deliberate policy of extending and reinterpreting the specifications
> and standards. As noted in that writeup, the consequences have not
> always been good (and some pruning is probably warranted).
>
> Fortunately, OpenBSD takes a more deliberate approach and this can
> help temper some of that silliness (in part, through peer pressure).
>
> That said, the laws themselves are a motivation here. In its current
> form, copyright law has been overly hostile to industry and coding in
> some ways, and presumably overly tolerant in some other ways (because
> people have limited time and attention). The open source community has
> been one successful workaround for this state of affairs. But the
> "undefined behavior" sillinesses are one kind of example of where the
> community misleads. Another successful workaround, in industry, has
> been to offload manufacturing to China (which has not agreed to these
> laws). But that introduces language barriers and other problems (which
> are out of scope for this mailing list). Anyways, it seems like
> industry should be demanding laws which enable it to get its work
> done, but this isn't a subject suitable for polite conversation.
>
> I wish I had a good answer here, but I don't...
>
> That said, ... for now at least, focusing on practical issues hasn't
> stopped being essential.
>
> Responses to this message should go to me and not the list.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Raul
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 8:07 AM Mayuresh Kathe <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Don't know if this has been discussed here before, but I found the
> > following excerpt from the article at
> > http://www.yodaiken.com/2018/12/31/undefined-behavior-and-the-purpose-of-c/
> > unnerving;
> > ... often the writers of the ISO C Standard have thrown up their hands
> > and labeled the effects of non-portable and potentially non-portable
> > operations "undefined behavior" for which they provided only a fuzzy
> > guideline. Unfortunately, the managers of the gcc and clang C compilers
> > have increasingly ignored the guideline and ignored well-established
> > well-understood practice, producing often bizarre and dangerous results
> > ...
> >
>
