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Scott Mcmahan vs Laurence Kirby

There seems to be a bug in the forum that it won't let you reply to
topics older than 60 days :(

Anyway, there's this interesting exchange from 29 Oct 1999:

Lawrence Kirby writes:
Scott McMahan writes:
Isn't the installed base of ANSI C so great now that the C99 standard
will just wither on the vine? C is good enough for what it does, and
has been stable for about 10 years, and the code base has reached the
saturation point. Are people really going to change to a different C now?

Very much so, the new standard contains a lot of useful features.
Once C99 compilers become commonplace which I would expect to happen in
the next 2-3 years a lot of new code will start to be written using it.
However compilers will probably support C90 for some time to come.
Time has proved one of these men a prophet! C99 is the embodiment of a
lame duck.

Jan 13 '07 #1
11 1463
rb********@mailinator.com wrote:
There seems to be a bug in the forum that it won't let you reply to
topics older than 60 days :(
That's not a bug, that's a feature that was added because Google Group
people were replying to years-old messages as if they were new ones.


Brian
Jan 13 '07 #2
rb********@mailinator.com said:
There seems to be a bug in the forum that it won't let you reply to
topics older than 60 days :(
That's not a bug - it's a feature! :-)

Seriously, if people were to make a habit of replying to seemingly random
articles from seven years ago, without the context that prevailed at the
time being conveniently available (after all, we don't *all* use Google,
you know), this group would become much *less* useful.

But the occasional blast from the past can be fun.
Anyway, there's this interesting exchange from 29 Oct 1999:

Lawrence Kirby writes:
>Scott McMahan writes:
>Isn't the installed base of ANSI C so great now that the C99 standard
will just wither on the vine? C is good enough for what it does, and
has been stable for about 10 years, and the code base has reached the
saturation point. Are people really going to change to a different C
now?

Very much so, the new standard contains a lot of useful features.
Once C99 compilers become commonplace which I would expect to happen in
the next 2-3 years a lot of new code will start to be written using it.
However compilers will probably support C90 for some time to come.
Lawrence Kirby is Hardly Ever Wrong. On that occasion, however, he does
appear to have been wr... well, not right.
Time has proved one of these men a prophet! C99 is the embodiment of a
lame duck.
Nah. Lame ducks might waddle a bit awkwardly, but at least they can fly.

--
Richard Heathfield
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29/7/1999
http://www.cpax.org.uk
email: rjh at the above domain, - www.
Jan 13 '07 #3
In article <11**********************@51g2000cwl.googlegroups. com>,
<rb********@mailinator.comwrote:
>C99 is the embodiment of a lame duck.
Surely lame ducks are already embodied?

-- Richard

--
"Consideration shall be given to the need for as many as 32 characters
in some alphabets" - X3.4, 1963.
Jan 13 '07 #4
<rb********@mailinator.comwrote in message
>
Anyway, there's this interesting exchange from 29 Oct 1999:

Lawrence Kirby writes:
>Scott McMahan writes:
>Isn't the installed base of ANSI C so great now that the C99 standard
will just wither on the vine? C is good enough for what it does, and
has been stable for about 10 years, and the code base has reached the
saturation point. Are people really going to change to a different C
now?

Very much so, the new standard contains a lot of useful features.
Once C99 compilers become commonplace which I would expect to happen in
the next 2-3 years a lot of new code will start to be written using it.
However compilers will probably support C90 for some time to come.

Time has proved one of these men a prophet! C99 is the embodiment of a
lame duck.
When I first saw the stl I thought "This is the end of C", because all the
operations that were efficient in C could be made even more efficient in
C++. Some timings I saw were very convincing.

However actually the reverse happened. STL was baroque syntax too far, and
seems to have dealt a serious blow to C++.
Jan 13 '07 #5
Richard Heathfield wrote:
Seriously, if people were to make a habit of replying to seemingly random
articles from seven years ago, without the context that prevailed at the
time being conveniently available (after all, we don't *all* use Google,
you know), this group would become much *less* useful.
I'm not sure... there are lots of really interesting topics from the
past, some with hundreds of posts. I'm sure people could have more to
say now, especially posters at the time who might have a different
opinion with hindsight.

Jan 13 '07 #6
Malcolm McLean wrote:
When I first saw the stl I thought "This is the end of C", because all the
operations that were efficient in C could be made even more efficient in
C++. Some timings I saw were very convincing.

However actually the reverse happened. STL was baroque syntax too far, and
seems to have dealt a serious blow to C++.
I despise C++ and refuse to use it or think about it, so I can't really
comment on the effects of the STL. However, it sounds like the
difference between that and C99 is that the STL added features that are
actually useful if you can get past the ugly syntax, whereas C99 didn't
add a single useful feature to the language, but only pointlessly
complicated bloat.

Jan 13 '07 #7
rb********@mailinator.com wrote:
Richard Heathfield wrote:
Seriously, if people were to make a habit of replying to seemingly
random articles from seven years ago, without the context that
prevailed at the time being conveniently available (after all, we
don't all use Google, you know), this group would become much less
useful.

I'm not sure... there are lots of really interesting topics from the
past, some with hundreds of posts. I'm sure people could have more to
say now, especially posters at the time who might have a different
opinion with hindsight.
Nonsensical. Topics can certainly come up again (they do constantly)
but it's near impossible to restart one with years-old context. As I
mentioned elsewhere, GG users were doing exactly that when the "Beta"
interface was dumped out on a unsuspecting public. That was high up on
the bug list of GG Beta, which they finally got around to fixing.

Most news services have a retention span of a few weeks to a few
months, which seems to work about right. Trying to revive dead threads
in place makes little or no sense. Most people won't have the context
on their services and wouldn't care to root back through GG archives
for it. Trying to post it would either leave out much of it or be
unreadable.

So, Google got it right, you got it wrong.


Brian
Jan 13 '07 #8
rbhlgjw...@mailinator.com wrote:
Malcolm McLean wrote:
When I first saw the stl I thought "This is the end of C", because all the
operations that were efficient in C could be made even more efficient in
C++. Some timings I saw were very convincing.

However actually the reverse happened. STL was baroque syntax too far, and
seems to have dealt a serious blow to C++.

I despise C++ and refuse to use it or think about it, [...]
Aren't you perhaps getting a bit emotional? It's just a programming
language after all, if you don't prefer, then don't use it.
so I can't really
comment on the effects of the STL. However, it sounds like the
difference between that and C99 is that the STL added features that are
actually useful if you can get past the ugly syntax, whereas C99 didn't
add a single useful feature to the language, but only pointlessly
complicated bloat.
IMHO, macros with variable arguments, empty arguments, the inline
keyword, declarations in the for loop, long long type, va_copy() are
all useful to have. I wouldn't say that C99 didn't add a single useful
feature. Also can you specify what you mean when you say above that the
C99 standard has added pointlessly complicated bloat? Are you talking
about the standard library or the core langauge?

Jan 13 '07 #9
Ark
rb********@mailinator.com wrote:
<snip>
whereas C99 didn't
add a single useful feature to the language, but only pointlessly
complicated bloat.
Is it so that only embedded people care these days about the size,
startup time and maintainability?!
If you can pre-compute things at compile time (and force the build break
if the underlying assumptions are no longer valid), isn't it great?
So, C99 designated initializers are alone worth the new version of the
standard.
Imagine a const array some or all elements of which have their indices
published to be accessed directly. Try to maintain this in C90 or C++.
In fact I had to write my own preprocessor (Unimal) to address issues
like that (and the first version was mimicking macro processors of good
assemblers). With C99, about 30% of things for which I used Unimal can
be done in C alone.
So I don't think one can say C99 added no useful features if one doesn't
recognize them or simply doesn't need them.

- Ark
Jan 13 '07 #10

rbhlgjw...@mailinator.com wrote:
There seems to be a bug in the forum that it won't let you reply to
topics older than 60 days :(

Anyway, there's this interesting exchange from 29 Oct 1999:

Lawrence Kirby writes:
Scott McMahan writes:
>Isn't the installed base of ANSI C so great now that the C99 standard
>will just wither on the vine? C is good enough for what it does, and
>has been stable for about 10 years, and the code base has reached the
>saturation point. Are people really going to change to a different C now?
Very much so, the new standard contains a lot of useful features.
Once C99 compilers become commonplace which I would expect to happen in
the next 2-3 years a lot of new code will start to be written using it.
However compilers will probably support C90 for some time to come.

Time has proved one of these men a prophet! C99 is the embodiment of a
lame duck.
Well, modulo the usual argument that if A predicts a coin will show
heads and B predicts tails, the fact that the coin shows heads does
not make A a prophet (I am not arguing that this analogy holds, just
that it always needs to be considered), I would agree. The scarcity
of C99 compilers, the moribund state of gcc's C99 conformance
work, and most tellingly the scarcity of support for C99 in tools,
certainly suggests that C99 is not a success. The usual counter
of "give it time" is beginning to ring very hollow indeed.

-William Hughes

Jan 13 '07 #11
Malcolm McLean <re*******@btinternet.comwrote:
When I first saw the stl I thought "This is the end of C", because all the
operations that were efficient in C could be made even more efficient in
C++. Some timings I saw were very convincing.
I doubt C would have ended in any case, as I would expect the same C90
compilers for embedded platforms to be used for years (decades?) to
come.
However actually the reverse happened. STL was baroque syntax too far, and
seems to have dealt a serious blow to C++.
I think that may be overstating the case somewhat, although admittedly
formatted output which printf() has always handled cleanly is an utter
disaster using <iostream>.

--
C. Benson Manica | I *should* know what I'm talking about - if I
cbmanica(at)gmail.com | don't, I need to know. Flames welcome.
Jan 13 '07 #12

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