The C is dead, long live the C

[Adam Turk]

It is true there are new standards. But my reasoning remains sound even
in light of this. Before I continue with this argument, I must first go
back and reference the original argument, of which C was merely an
example. My points of argument were the need for standards or not, and
what kind of standards kill an new system. Thus, I will proceed: no
single C syntactical element can change. This is a given. If it did, it
would arguably no longer be C. Because things change, need syntaxes
become a necessity. C cannot change its syntax to fill this need,
because of specific standards about its syntax (not a bad thing, just an
example). Thus, a new language must be created to fill this new need.
Correct? Now, when the arguments in this thread are overlayed back onto
the original topic: "Specific standards for Linux will surely kill it",
one sees that this is true, because Linux, unlike C, changes daily,
morphs and mutates to meet needs. This is one of its best attributes for
me, not a sticking point. But new, rigid standards will make it a dead
OS. People will still develop for it, but within constraints. People
doing things differently from distro to distro is a pain, not only
because they are lazy coders (or possibly visionaries), but because we
do not want to separate the wheat from the chaff. We rely on "industry
bigwigs" to hand down to us what is we should believe is best. Thus the
art dries, the frontier ends, the poineer is forced to move on.

Adam

"We'll never survive!"
"Nonsense, you're only saying that because no one ever has."
-TPB

>>> "Jeremy Fowler" <jfowler at westrope.com> 02/07/02 09:17AM >>>
However your reasoning is flawed. People are still developing C to make
it a
better language. Hence my reference to C99, a new standard that supports
many
new features. So the C language is not a solid brick as you would
believe. As
soon as someone stops developing something, then it is dead; because it
soon
becomes obsolete. OS2, BeOS, MSDOS are good examples of dead software.