gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (09/14/89)
In article <2127@dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright@dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes: >In article <11032@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes: ><In article <2121@dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright@dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes: ><<C is now mature, standard, and therefore obsolete. ><I generally agreed with your comments, except "therefore obsolete". >Perhaps an analogy would help. As anyone who works on jet fighter aircraft >design knows, as soon as you freeze the design in order to put the plane >into production, it is obsolete. The reason is that the design stands still, >while technological progress moves forward continuously. Hm, this must be some new use of the term "obsolete". I doubt that anyone in a position to know would agree that the SR-71 or F-15E are obsolete. On the other hand, the B-2 will rapidly become obsolete as the Soviet radar system is changed to use non-colocated transmitter and receiver, because the colocation assumption is built into the B-2 design. Obsolescence has little to do with age. It has to do with reduction of utility. C appears to me to have quite a stretch of continued utility ahead of it, for example in implementing translators from new languages into C as a portable intermediate language. (C is not ideal for this, but we have nothing better available.)