ambiguous ?

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <14114 at lanl.gov> jlg at lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>The C standard has been through 3 public reviews and is presently facing
>a class-action suit.  It is still not an official standard.  This does
>not qualify as "a reality" in my book.

What "class-action suit"?  This is the first I've heard about it.

The three public reviews were a normal part of the process, to which you
could have contributed if you had condescended to do so.  I have no record
of you having submitted your comments when they were being solicited.

X3J11 and X3 have both approved the proposed ANSI C standard from a
technical perspective (analogous approvals have been occurring in
ISO WG14).  The only delay is to give one individual with a grudge
a hearing on procedural issues.  Nobody I know of expects ANSI to
side with that individual.  Thus, we know at this point precisely
what the final ANSI standard for the C programming language is
expected to look like technically.  The delay is purely bureaucratic.
Correspondingly, vendors have been proceeding to implement the Standard
and application developers have been coding with Standard C taken into
account, and books based on the Standard have already been published.

>I post articles in opposition to the view widely promoted in this newsgroup
>that C as it currently exists is _already_ the language of the future.

I would be interested in actual quotations to that effect.  I don't
recall ANYbody here saying that C is the language of the future.
It is definitely an important language of the present, recent past,
and near term, though.

>... I would dispute the claim
>that C is _the_ systems programming language of this century.

Hey, so would I.  It's certainly the most important systems programming
language of the 1976-1990 time frame, if for no other reason than that
UNIX was implemented primarily in C.  (But there are other reasons too.)

But again, who gives a rat's ass about this?  Claims are a dime a dozen,
probably cheaper.  I could claim that ESPOL was the best systems
programming language invented so far, or BLISS, or Modula-2, or Eiffel,
but WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH C?