Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Obsolete? (was: Inlining -- what happened to the inline keyword)
Keywords: obsolete
Message-ID: <11058@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 14 Sep 89 11:42:06 GMT
References: <4783@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <2121@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <11032@smoke.BRL.MIL> <2127@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 21

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into production, it is obsolete.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.)