You do seem widely read. As if you were locked in a library for several years
and had nothing to do but read the books. Not the technical ones it seems, but
the Poli Sci ones. You've read more Marx than Knuth I'll bet. Who is John Galt?

I've been programming professionally since 1979 and until today. I can program
rings around you and I'm still junior to many in this group. You are a fraud.

I find usenet kooks amusing.  He's an excellent example of the type.
I was originally interested in seeing his arguments or reasons for his
claims about the standardization process, but at this point I'm obliged
to grant that he's just plain crazy.

But still sorta funny.  You gotta admire someone who, a week AFTER you
tell him that you're thinking of using his posts as a drinking game,
expresses shock and dismay to discover that you don't seem to be taking
him seriously.

Not the funniest kook I've ever engaged with, but by far the champion
of the pure non-sequitur.  I've talked to people whose posts were pure word
salad who were less able to astound and amaze with the sheer lack of
relationship between their positions and their stated reasons.

ObC: is there some reason why structs, unions and enums don't live in
distinct namespaces?

--
Aatu Koskensilta (aatu.koskensi...@uta.fi)

        enum foo { APPLE, ORANGE, BANANA };
        enum bar { DELL, GATEWAY, APPLE };
        printf ("APPLE = %d\n", APPLE);

... there is nothing in the final line that could designate
whether foo's or bar's APPLE was intended.

        typedef struct foo { int i; float f; } foo;

     However, the name space for tags includes *all* the tags,
so you can't have

        struct foo { int i; float f; };
        union foo { double d; char c; };
        enum foo { BAR, BAZ };

... which my earlier sloppy wording might have suggested.  Sorry
for any confusion.

  /* look, no clashes */
  enum foo;
  struct foo;
  union foo;

Well, the reason why structs and unions would be in the same space is
somewhat understandable: they are a variation on the same kind of thing.  A
union is a variation on the structure type, where the members are all at offset
zero. Still, the different keyword does disambiguate!

There is no good reason why ``enum foo'' cannot coexist with ``struct foo'',
since the tag is clearly disambiguated by context, and enumerations
and aggregates are very different things.

These restrictions did help the development of C++ though.

The reason why they are all conflated into one namespace is likely historic.
Early C compilers did not even put the /members/ into a separate namespace!
The member names had to be unique. That's why ``struct stat'' in Unix
has member names like ``st_ino''.

So the present situation of members being scoped to their respective
types is an improvement.

You'll note that they all have the same basic form; <metatype> <tag>.