On Fri, Feb 27, 2026 at 7:15 PM Jonathan Grant via Std-Proposals <
std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On 22/02/2026 13:32, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> >> Also, the more I look at code examples using this, the less I like the
> >> name. It didn't tell me what it does. All assertions are compiled, what
> is
> >> a "compile assert"? Assert that something compiles, i.e. is
> syntactically
> >> valid? That's what a requires expression does, but it's not what this
> does.
> >
> > I call this compiler_assert(), which I think is a better name.
>
> I've added your compiler_assert suggestion to my draft edit, I'm
> definitely keen to discuss and choose the most appropriate name.
>
> You've probably heard this story - but I'll share it:
>
> When Dennis Richie was asked what he would change about UNIX if he could
> do it again, it he said he would add an 'e' on creat().


Nit: It wasn't Dennis Ritchie who said that, but Ken Thompson.

(See *The UNIX Programming Environment* (1984), page 204
<https://archive.org/details/unixprogramminge0000kern/page/204/mode/2up?q=creat>;
also Peter Salus's 1994 book *A Quarter Century of Unix*, page 43
<https://archive.org/details/aquartercenturyofunixpeterh.salus_201910/page/n55/mode/2up?q=creat>.
(Salus writes that Doug McIlroy's candidate for biggest mistake was his
originally spelling *UNIX* in all caps. ;))
Off-topic: Another anecdote from that book, one that was news to me, this
time actually from Dennis Ritchie—

> I guess there were a few new [programs] that were written in B. One of the
> earlier ones was the thing that did the expansion of stars and whatnot in
> filenames: the `glob` command. [*Rather than the shell program doing this
> expansion itself, the shell would do it by invoking an external program.*]
> This stood for `global`, for reasons that escape me; it's not very sensible.

)

Cheers,
Arthur