I was a member of the UK C panel (BSI IST/5/-/14) from June 2001 until it was disbanded in September 2008, and am convenor of the panel (BSI IST/5/-/24) reestablished in 2013. This panel deals in the UK with issues associated with the development of the C standard (ISO/IEC 9899) and submitted Defect Reports relating to it to WG14. I attended the WG14 meeting in London in April 2007 as part of the UK delegation, and the WG14 meeting in London in March 2011 as head of the UK delegation.
I have some pre-DRs (discussions of issues in ISO 9899 that might or might not be defects) for consideration for possible future Defect Reports. (These were written in the previous period of activity of the UK C Panel up to 2008, and are now more likely to be used in other ways than submitted as DRs.) Some of the pre-DRs discuss multiple related issues, of which some may be defects and some not. Some of the pre-DRs which were here have been revised and split into multiple separate issues; to avoid confusion, the original pre-DRs remain available unchanged at their original URLs, although not linked to, in addition to the new versions. Those pre-DRs which have been submitted as DRs and published as WG14 documents are also no longer linked to here.
I also have a discussion of issues with constant expressions (not in the form of the pre-DRs above; parts may become DRs following implementation experience).
I have submitted DRs 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445.
Several previous DRs (248, 249, 251, 265, 270, 277, 278), written by Clive Feather, relate to problems I found in the C standard, as does 318, written by Fred Tydeman.
Constant expressions (C90 subclause 6.4, C99 subclause 6.6) are one of the more obscure areas of the C standards that hitherto GCC has not made a serious attempt to implement properly. The standards are also unclear in this area; see my discussion of issues with constant expressions mentioned above (which specifically deals with C99 as the current standard, but much the same problems arise with C90, apart from those depending on VLAs).
The following discussions present models of the constant expression rules in terms of synthesised attributes of syntax productions, for C90, C99 and GNU C. Because the standard is in places unclear, they do not describe a unique possible interpretation, but they are intended to describe plausible interpretations that are suitable for implementation in GCC and substantially correspond with what I implemented for GCC 4.5. These models may be affected by the resolution of any DRs filed relating to the problems with constant expressions.
The GNU C model only roughly approximates what was accepted before 4.5, tending to err on the side of not accepting some form of expression as constant if in doubt, but it is hoped that it will adequately cover most user expectations. Bug 16711, relating to the implementation of constant expression rules for C++, shows that some very strange undocumented extensions to constant expression rules are used by some users, but such cases as that are expected to be rare. The GNU C rules will generally be laxer about extensions to constant expressions in initializers than to extensions to integer constant expressions.
Implementation following such models provides a proper
reference to turn to for resolution of such disputes as that
over the validity of
gcc.c-torture/compile/20010327-1.c. It is also
clearly beneficial for the code accepted by GCC to be well-defined
rather than depending on what that day’s compiler happens to
fold.
These models are models of the interpretation of C code and do not require a particular implementation.
I co-maintain the C front end of GCC, as well as various other parts of GCC, and am a Global Reviewer and a Release Manager. More recently, I have also been maintaining and developing glibc and other parts of the GNU toolchain, and formerly maintained EGLIBC.
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