On the C99 Status

[Martin Krischik]

Am Samstag 22 März 2008 schrieb Paulo J. Matos:

> The other possibility is that gcc,
> as a big software beast, is getting so big that adding completely new
> features might be quite hard... 

I thing this is close - but in a much grander scale - Most of the other 
available C compiler don't have C99 support either.

I think that C as a language is getting such a big language beast on such 
small foundations that adding completely new features is be quite hard. This 
is what you get when you build on to weak foundations.

Note that the features you mentioned have been available for in - in for 
example Ada - for over ten  years (complex numbers ) or 20 years (variable 
length arrays) now - and they have been implemented by the compiler vendors.

I mention Ada because this is where good foundation come into play. When Ada 
came out it was dismissed for been to heavy and difficult - while C was so 
light and elegant.

Now 20 years later and see what happened: The Ada front end of GCC 4.3 
implements Ada 2007 in full - only a year after the standard was finalised 
while the C front end - with a lot lot more maintainers  working on - still 
has not got C99 implemented - That's 8 years late! And ISO standards are 
renewed every 10 years - so C 2009 should be around the corner now.

As I said: the foundations of C are to weak (Read an original first printing 
K&R to see what I mean) - they can not hold and more features. 

Martin

-- 
Martin Krischik
mailto://krischik@users.sourceforge.net
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