A tale of two C's.

[Ned Nowotny]

At one time, C was an elegant, though imperfect, language.  The language
itself was purely control flow and data definition.

Now, however, X3J11, in the interest of runaway optimization, has exploded
the name space of the language by reserving a whole host of function, macro,
and data names.  While it is true that almost everyone wants standard libraries
with their C compilers which match the libraries developed over the years on
systems running the various flavors of Unix, I can't believe a majority of C
programmers want these library definitions rolled into the language.

ANSI C looks more like Pascal, Ada, Modula (pick a number), etc. every day.
Maybe we do need D or its equivalent.  Or maybe, there will be two languages
supported in the market place by, possibly competing, vendors -- C and ANSI-C.

That's it.  There are two languages involved here: ANSI-C, standardized by
X3J11 (thank you), and C, not quite standardized by K&R (possibly the second
edition).

Perhaps this is the best of all possible worlds after all.
-- 

Ned Nowotny (ned at ghostwheel.aca.mcc.com.UUCP)