Comments on David Hough's proposed ballot submissions -- minWidth

[Michel Hack <hack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On minWidth:  Perhaps my objection to minWidth_nobinary was due to a
reading or printing error.  From David's reply it appears that this was
supposed to be an attribute with a parameter, e.g. a program might have:
  #pragma minWidth nobinary

I had read it as a single word.  The red underline may have been to blame.

Still, it may be confusing to have one attribute name that can have two
simultaneous "values", one for each radix.  A #pragma interpretation can
deal with this by stating that different parameters override each other
within a radix, but it might be cleaner to have two attributes, minWidth2
and minWidth10, with values such as "none" or some format name.  It is
also possible to have two setting or query operations, setAttributeBinary
and setAttributeDecimal, with a single attribute name, as was done for
rounding direction modes in 9.3.1.

David is right that the mininum supported width needs a name, because the
program may want to run on platforms with different minimum widths.

Michel.
Sent: 2008-01-30 14:22:36 UTC