Re: changing "configure" to default to "gcc -g -O2 -fwrapv ..."

[Richard Kenner]

> And the idea that people were not used to thinking seriously about
> language semantics is very odd, this book was published in 1978,
> ten years after the algol-68 report, a year after the fortran
> 77 standard, long after the COBOL 74 standard, and a year before the 
> PL/1 standard. It's not that old!

I knew you were going to say something like that, which is why I edited
my message to say "most people": yes, there were certainly groups (I 
specifically had Algol 68 in mind) who were thinking of programming
languages in very formal terms, but those represented an even smaller
minority of the community than now and certainly the Unix/C community's
view at that point was much more pragmatic than formal: that's the point
that a lot of people in this thread are making.