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From: devine@shodha.dec.com (Bob Devine)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Inlining -- what happened to the inline keyword
Keywords: ansi inline
Message-ID: <412@shodha.dec.com>
Date: 14 Sep 89 18:19:50 GMT
References: <4783@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <2121@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <2127@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Organization: Digital Equipment Corp. - Colorado Springs, CO.
Lines: 17

In article <2127@dataio.Data-IO.COM>, bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes:
> <<C is now mature, standard, and 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 into production, it is obsolete.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.

  This is a strange use of the word "obsolete".  While I would agree
that a static product may be on a path towards obsolescence, such a
path may be very long.

  The key question is if C is still useful (ie non-obsolete) in its
standardized form.  I think it is.  In fact, it may be more so now
that I won't have to #ifdef the disparate chunks of code between
different systems that proport to support C.

Bob Devine