The C is dead, long live the C

[Monty J. Harder]

"DCT Jared Smith" <jared at dctkc.com> opined:

> </sarcasm> In other words,
>
> I propose we move beyond the point of calling creativity idiotic.

  I calls 'em as I sees 'em.  Making anything that is not a printable
character syntactically significant is just plain dumb.   It's contrary to
several of the central tenets of Linux, that source code be editable in
one's editor of choice, that as much of the system as practicable be
expressed in pure, unadulterated ASCII (or Unicode, but let's make that
UTF-8, if you don't mind); and that interchangeable parts allows
coordination of 'small, sharp tools' to accomplish great things.  If I
=have= to use a special editor to write in this language, I will not bother
with it.

  This proposal demands that code be in a form that can only be manipulated
by tools specifically written to handle it.  That means that I can't write a
perl/sed/awk script to patch source code in a way that's important to me,
because the source code isn't text anymore.

  Let me repeat that having config files to adapt popular editors to use
color IN ADDITION TO whatever syntactic markers are actually significant is
a Good Thing.  Such editors preserve the actual text, but use color,
italics, boldface, etc. to make that text more readable.