Re: Operator overloading in C

Eric Sosman wrote:
jacob navia wrote On 09/05/07 13:51,:
Douglas A. Gwyn wrote:

I take issue with Navia's characterization of C's status, its past
and its future, as well as with several of his technical assertions.
There are so many disputable points that I don't wish to address
them individually at this time.

This is of course very easy for you.

And it is very constructive. Not even the shadow of an argumentation.

A technical proposal is likely to receive more of a
hearing if couched in less inflammatory language. Some
examples, with commentary:

- "All development of C as an independent language
has been neglected ..."

That is, the people who have been working on the
various Standards have been derelict in their duty.
It's a tactical misstep to insult the people you
are trying to persuade.


I am not insulting anybody. I just disagree with the work
done till now in the standard. C99 did not address any of the
real flaws of the language like the string library or
the inability of writing a generic container library.

In the other hand it added complex numbers, and many
other things that are maybe OK but weren't really
needed.

The result was a catastrophic failure with gcc and
Microsoft both leaving the implementation of C99 to
some day in the future...

This is a critic, but not a destructive critic.

I try to think a way out of this situation. It is better
in this situations to speak what you think...

- "... and C has been relegated to the past."

That is, C is a dead language and there is no
reason to continue developing its Standards --
in which case, there's no reason to waste effort
studying any proposals.


Maybe it is too late already. Maybe not. But the attitude that is
lingering around to issue the next standard document sometime
in 2020 is not a good idea.


- "This situation is exacerbated by the C standards
comitee [sic], that after the bad reception of the
new C99 standard has gone into deep sleep, ..."

Another slap in the faces of the people you wish
to persuade.


If we leave the next revision of the language to 2020 what
else is that as "deep sleep" ???

- "C is now effectively frozen."

Once again, the proposal argues for its own non-
consideration.


No. I just describe the impression in this newsgroup. Somebdoy remember
the discussion about gets() ?

The discussion about trigraphs?

The discussion about asctime() ?

In all those discussions I was greeted with the same arguments. It
wasn't until Microsoft proposed something that something started to
change here. I am not Microsoft of course. I can
safely be ignored as Mr Gwyn announced already.

Have you ever heard the adage "You can catch more flies
with honey than with vinegar?"


Maybe. But I think it is necessary to speak out sometimes.
.

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