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From: dsill@NSWC-OAS.arpa (Dave Sill)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Evolution of the language (was Re: *\\\"LDA\\\" ok?)
Message-ID: <9073@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 31-Aug-87 13:33:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.9073
Posted: Mon Aug 31 13:33:29 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Sep-87 05:44:16 EDT
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In article <1025@argus.UUCP>, argus!ken (Kenneth Ng) writes:
>In article <9042@brl-adm.ARPA>, dsill@NSWC-OAS.arpa (Dave Sill) writes:
>> Would you call the changes in C from K&R to dpANS evolutionary?
>> Biological evolution is on clock so slow that thousands of years are
>> required to implement noticeable change.
>
>Biological evolution takes thousands of years?  How about the resistance
>of insects to pesticides like DDT?  Granted some of the insects may have
>already had the resistance, but I'd say that as a whole the insect
>species has evolved to become resistant to it.

Okay, perhaps I should have said "thousands of *generations*".  My
point still stands.  The language is changing at a rate that can
hardly be considered evolutionary.  For truly evolutionary change to
occur, the lifetime of source code would have to be shorter than or
equal to the intervals at which the language is changed.  Until this
is the case, which it won't be any time soon (software never dies),
backward compatibility will be a problem.

K&R consider the obsoleting of the =op assignment operators to be an
example of an evolutionary change to C.  In fact, this may be as close
as software can come to evolution.  It's certainly more evolutionary
than dpANS's function prototypes, which I think represent a
*revolutionary* change.

-Dave