You are viewing a single comment's thread. View all
4
MrBaptist on scored.co
1 year ago4 points(+0/-0/+4Score on mirror)1 child
[Andrew's problematic submission](https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2024/p3403r0.pdf) doesn't propose a Final Solution, but it does make ominous references to The Question.
[From the writer's own explanation](http://tomazos.com/ub_question_incident.pdf), he initially had no idea and thought it was touching the undefined behavior problem itself that was the issue:
> During the presentation [...] there was what seemed to me to be an odd comment. I think I heard someone say “you should change the paper title”. Upon hearing this I didn’t really understand, I thought it was a joke about “undefined behavior” being a dirty word or something. So I giggled a little, playing along with what I perceived as a joke, and continued on with the presentation.
He thought about changing the title, but the content would still allude to The Question:
> I thought through options for drafting changes to the paper, and realized what I was thinking about was altering the semantic structure of the paper itself. The paper poses an important question about undefined behavior and so the title is correct [...] Throughout the paper it refers to “The Question” as an abbreviation for “The Undefined Behavior Question”. So even if I changed the title the paper would still refer to “The Question”, and I thought to myself, would this satisfy those complaining or do they want that changed too?
He ultimately chose to take a stand, so they holocausted him from the committee:
> I was then informed by the head of the delegation that they “fully understand that principles are important, but [...] we are at a place where the title is causing offence and objections from multiple individuals, and that is not acceptable for us.“
Some aspects of this come across like the true goal was to silence Andrew's long-standing issues with the actual concepts related to The Question, with his fashiness being a convenient excuse.
Due to its long lifespan, C++ has various inherited design flaws and limitations (such as the aforementioned undefined behavior). Younger languages like Rust are [anti-Undefined Behavior racists](https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/behavior-considered-undefined.html) - if you write unclear code like this, the compiler is meant to intentionally refuse to continue, basically telling you to "learn to code" and "git gud".
[From the writer's own explanation](http://tomazos.com/ub_question_incident.pdf), he initially had no idea and thought it was touching the undefined behavior problem itself that was the issue:
> During the presentation [...] there was what seemed to me to be an odd comment. I think I heard someone say “you should change the paper title”. Upon hearing this I didn’t really understand, I thought it was a joke about “undefined behavior” being a dirty word or something. So I giggled a little, playing along with what I perceived as a joke, and continued on with the presentation.
He thought about changing the title, but the content would still allude to The Question:
> I thought through options for drafting changes to the paper, and realized what I was thinking about was altering the semantic structure of the paper itself. The paper poses an important question about undefined behavior and so the title is correct [...] Throughout the paper it refers to “The Question” as an abbreviation for “The Undefined Behavior Question”. So even if I changed the title the paper would still refer to “The Question”, and I thought to myself, would this satisfy those complaining or do they want that changed too?
He ultimately chose to take a stand, so they holocausted him from the committee:
> I was then informed by the head of the delegation that they “fully understand that principles are important, but [...] we are at a place where the title is causing offence and objections from multiple individuals, and that is not acceptable for us.“
Some aspects of this come across like the true goal was to silence Andrew's long-standing issues with the actual concepts related to The Question, with his fashiness being a convenient excuse.
Due to its long lifespan, C++ has various inherited design flaws and limitations (such as the aforementioned undefined behavior). Younger languages like Rust are [anti-Undefined Behavior racists](https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/behavior-considered-undefined.html) - if you write unclear code like this, the compiler is meant to intentionally refuse to continue, basically telling you to "learn to code" and "git gud".