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1. Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra (elizafox@social.tulsa.ok.us)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Apr-2022 01:33:30 UTC Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra

   RMS announced at a talk he's releasing an unofficial GNU C manual:

   >I have written a manual for GNU C, and the Free Software Foundation is going to publish it in not-too-terribly long. Now, why do I say it's a manual for GNU C? It does not try to describe the C standard — because that would be tremendously complicated, and tremendously hard to use.

   (cont)

   • Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra (elizafox@social.tulsa.ok.us)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Apr-2022 01:33:28 UTC Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra

     in reply to

     >Now, GCC follows the C standard. It will be quote "conforming" if you specify certain options, which you don't actually have to specify. But by only describing what GCC does — and not all the other possible things some other compiler might do without violating the standard, it makes the manual much simpler and clearer. So I hope that once this manual has settled down, people will adapt it to cover other languages that are more or less of the same category.

     (cont)

   • Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra (elizafox@social.tulsa.ok.us)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Apr-2022 01:33:28 UTC Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra

     in reply to

     This is disturbing because:

     * He didn't notify the GCC mailing list, he just announced it at a talk
     * He hasn't contributed to GCC in 20 years, and it's in C++ now, a language RMS neither uses nor likes
     * RMS is clearly bypassing mechanisms of accountability to push his views, which likely don't reflect those of the actual maintainers of GCC
     * If you read it based on his past history, he clearly is claiming ultimate authority over GCC, and dictating GCC policy unilaterally, bypassing the SC

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   • Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra (elizafox@social.tulsa.ok.us)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Apr-2022 01:33:29 UTC Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra

     in reply to

     >It's not just that there are a lot of details in the C standard. It's written in terms of abstractions. Instead of telling you what the program means, it tells you what the program is permitted to mean. So you need to think at a second-order level to make sense of the C standard. Well, the purpose of this manual is to enable people to learn C, and also to enable them to look up the details of what C constructs mean...

     (cont)

   • Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra (elizafox@social.tulsa.ok.us)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Apr-2022 01:33:29 UTC Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra

     in reply to

     >And indeed, C inevitably is full of wrinkles and more complex rules, but I've tried to express them in ways that make it easier to understand C programming. And part of what enabled me to do that is forgetting about the standard.

     (cont)

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Apr-2022 01:33:45 UTC Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     @Elizafox

     "* He didn't notify the GCC mailing list, he just announced it at a talk"

     You mean like last year when he didn't notify the FSF employees he was returning the board? And incorrectly stated they didn't have expertise to create a proper announcement video?

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   • Martin Owens (doctormo@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Apr-2022 04:35:02 UTC Martin Owens

     in reply to

     @Elizafox

     Viz. Old man yells at cloud, forces charity to publish his cloud thesis.

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   • Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra (elizafox@social.tulsa.ok.us)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Apr-2022 04:54:07 UTC Elizafox and Nvidia at Tegra

     in reply to

     AND:

     https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html

     This excellent email sums things up nicely as to why RMS shouldn't be in charge of anything more sophisticated than a hot dog stand.

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   • valhalla (valhalla@social.gl-como.it)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Apr-2022 07:20:51 UTC valhalla

     in reply to
     @Elizafox nevermind not contributing to GCC, AFAIK he hasn't written any kind of program since the last millennium (nor he has kept up to date with the programming world) and now he's writing a programming manual?
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   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Apr-2022 07:22:56 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to

     • valhalla
     @valhalla @Elizafox C is timeless if you ignore C90, C99, C11 and C17. 😅