Re: qsort_r

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> No new machine will ever have this property because there's too much
> existing code that would break and there's no plausible reason to
> bother.

> Similarly, for all-bits-0 floats, no new machine is going to use
> anything but IEEE floats.

If you really believe those, there's no point in carrying this part of
the thread any farther.  I find each of them ludicrously implausible;
"ever" is way too long a time, and "nothing will use anything but IEEE
floats" is about as certain as "everything is little-endian".  Indeed,
I suspect C is piling up trouble for itself by mandating binary (when
(not "if") a non-binary computer arises, it makes C that much more
likely to be abandoned than adapted).

The only question in my mind is how far off these changes are.  I'm
reasonably sure none of them will hit the mass market within the next
decade or so, but that's about all I'm confident of.

> If you keep worrying about how porky gcc is, sooner or later you'll
> get irritated enough to write your own...

True.  That it will ever happen, though, depends on a bunch of
assumptions which are looking less and less plausible these years.

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