Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!ginosko!uunet!pilchuck!dataio!bright
From: bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Inlining -- what happened to the inline keyword
Keywords: ansi inline
Message-ID: <2127@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Date: 13 Sep 89 21:19:28 GMT
References: <4783@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <2121@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <11032@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: bright@dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Organization: Data I/O Corporation; Redmond, WA
Lines: 30

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".
<There are some gaps in the chain of reasoning that I am unable to supply.

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into production, it is obsolete.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.

The same goes for a computer language. Once you freeze the spec, it becomes
steadily obsolete, because there is continuous progress in both compiler
technology and programming techniques. As evidence of this, look at
languages that have been standardized in the past, and the weaknesses that
have subsequently been discovered in them. New languages are invented to
take advantage of new computer hardware, new compilation techniques,
and new programming styles/techniques.

<117VAC, 60Hz in the USA is mature and standard, but by no means obsolete.

I don't know much about power transmission, but are you so sure it's not
obsolete? Given today's technology, wouldn't some other voltage or frequency
be more efficient? I know that the inertia of existing equipment is too
vast to contemplate changing this, but that doesn't not make it obsolete.

TV transmission format was high tech in 1950, but is now hopelessly obsolete.
Backwards compatibility is a major problem for proponents of HDTV. But I
do hope that the HDTV people plan a way for an HDTV++ when they settle
on a standard!