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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Evolution of the language (was Re: *\\\"LDA\\\" ok?)
Message-ID: <6375@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 31-Aug-87 18:21:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.6375
Posted: Mon Aug 31 18:21:03 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Sep-87 07:07:59 EDT
References: <9073@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 14

In article <9073@brl-adm.ARPA> dsill@NSWC-OAS.arpa (Dave Sill) writes:
>It's certainly more evolutionary
>than dpANS's function prototypes, which I think represent a
>*revolutionary* change.

Without getting into the (probably unresolvable) issue of the exact
distinction between "evolutionary" and "revolutionary", I want to
point out that function prototypes in C are not an invention of
X3J11; they were in fact introduced in Stroustrup's "C with classes",
which evolved into C++.  There had been sufficient experience with
them to convince X3J11 that they were both practical and desirable.
The only difficulty was in figuring out how to "grandfather in" old
code that doesn't use function prototypes.  Now, if X3J11 had simply
outlawed such code in the standard, that WOULD have been revolutionary.