>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)

>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)

>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)

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