8.1. Government Health Warning

The previous chapters have introduced the fundamentals of the language and have covered nearly all of the language that the Standard defines. There are a number of murky and convoluted backwaters left unexplored on grounds of sympathy and compassion for the sufferer, and some without any better home. This chapter gathers them together—it's the toxic waste dump for the nasty bits of C.

Pull on your rubber gloves, read the following sections and make notes where you think the material is important to you; re-read them from time to time as well. What seemed uninteresting and painful the first time round may change as your experience grows, or your natural immunity improves.

What we cover here is not an exhumation of all the pathogenic elements—we leave that for another book—but it does serve to round up most of the commonly encountered difficult or extraordinary material.