Obsolete? (was: Inlining -- what happened to the inline keyword)
Doug Gwyn
gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL
Thu Sep 14 21:42:06 AEST 1989
In article <2127 at dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright at dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes:
>In article <11032 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
><In article <2121 at dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright at 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into production, it is obsolete.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.)
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