Re: Conformance

jacob navia wrote:
James Kuyper wrote:

Hey - has it occurred to you that people just don't think your ideas
have much merit?

It has occurred to me yes. And it has also occurred to me that if that
would be the case, alternative ways would have been proposed, or that
a refusal of my ideas would have appeared.

Only if someone thought alternatives were needed, or that it was
worthwhile bothering to refuse (? did you mean rebuttal?) your ideas.

....
This was tried before, and turned out to be a "slippery slope" with the
target clientele better served by simply switching to C++.

Yes. C++ is the better C, and all development of C, therefore, is
completely useless.

As usual, you're misreading his comment, and I can't see how you could
be doing so unless it were deliberate. What he said is that C++ is
better than C for certain types of programming, and C is better than C++
for others. That is quite different from saying that C is useless.


No, you are not reading well apparently. He said
>>> This was tried before, and turned out to be a "slippery slope" with the
>>> target clientele better served by simply switching to C++.

Nowhere do I read there that he says that there C is better than C++
for *something*

I cut too much; I should have included the immediately following
sentence, which implies precisely that:

Doug Gwyn wrote:
... C's primary target clientele has always been systems programmers, which these days
is largely focused on embedded systems, not applications developers.

That pretty clearly implies, especially in the context of the
immediately preceding sentence which I cited above, that he does
indeed consider C to be better than C++ for it's target clientele,
systems programmers.

....
Reducing the differences between the languages only serves to put the
two languages into closer competition with each other for the same kinds
of applications, and C will lose that competition by reason of being
behind the curve in comparison with C++.

I think that here we come closer to the center of the disagreement.
You think that C will lose because it has far less features than C++.

No, I think that C would lose if we followed that path, because the
features that you want to add to it are of at best marginal usefulness
without the additional associated features that C++ provides; anyone
who wants to use the features you propose, would be better served with
a system that also provides those associated features.

I think that C will WIN BECAUSE it has LESS features than C++.

I think that C will always have a niche where it is superior to C++,
and will never displace C++ from the main niches where C++ is
currently a superior language. I believe that C's niche is a large
one, and is based precisely on the simplicity it currently posesses,
an advantage that it would lose if it adopted the features you propose
plus enough associate features to make your proposed changes
worthwhile.

What you fail to understand is that a simpler language has a huge
advantage before a complex one.

You're right, I do not understand things that way. It is a real
advantage, but not a huge one. The size of that advantage is very
context-dependent, and it's getting smaller as computers get more and
more powerful. I think that there will always be a place for a
language like C (though not necessarily C itself), but that it will
never displace C++ from the places where C++ is currently preferred.

Any plan for C's future that
doesn't call for it's extinction must must emphasize moving in the
direction of what C does better than C++, not things that C++ does
better than C.


I would really like that you stop proposing empty sentences and fill that
a bit.

What are then those directions where you want to develop the language?

As I see it, C primarily needs additions that will make it a more
suitable platform for embedded systems development, and the committee
is indeed addressing that area of concern. As my own area of interest
is scientific programming, I'm not really competent to make detailed
suggestions in that area. In my own area of interest, the main thing I
need is powerful library routines that do not, in general, belong in
the C standard library, but are more appropriately provided by third-
party libraries. The main thing I need from the C standard itself is
sufficient stability to allow me to continue using these third party
libraries, some of which were last updated decades ago. The last
language-level feature I needed was complex arithmetic, and that was
added in C99.

....
There are a fair number of other programming languages better suited for
the majority of modern applications; no simple set of changes and
additions to C (that don't get in the way of systems programming) would
make C really competitive with these.

Yes. Again the same mantra: C is completely fucked up, let's leave it
like that. Why change it? Go to C++.

Why do you deliberately change a statement that says that there are many
purpose for which C is inferior to C++ into a statement that C is
useless?

Because I am reading what he wrote:
>>> There are a fair number of other programming languages better
suited for
>>> the majority of modern applications;

The majority of applications should be done in "another language". It is
not very hard to see what language that is.

Note first of all that he was contrasting application programming with
other kinds of programming; the comment you're referring to applies
only to applications programming.

Secondly, he says very clearly that he believes "There are a fair
number of other programming languages ...". You're misreading him
badly if you think he's saying that this "fair number" is 1.

....
But this is BLOCKED by the people in the committee, maybe because
all of them have an interest in the development of C++.

Very few of them do. As supermajority of them are interested exclusively
in C; they just have a very different vision of the future of C than you
do.


Mr Plauger writes C++ libraries, as far as I know. I do not know who is
in the committee right now, ...

Then I would recommend that you find out before spreading slanderous
generalizations about what their motivations are.

....
In the long run, the people on the committee cannot block your ideas, if
they have true merit. If the large numbers of downloads of your compiler
that you're constantly trumpeting ever results in a significant amount
of code being written that makes use of your compiler's extensions,
other compilers will start adopting those same extensions, if only to
protect their own market share.

Yeah, in an ideal world yes. In practice I have neither the money,
nor the big pockets, nor the bank account nor...

How much money do you have to pay people to use your compiler? If your
compiler with it's extensions to C were as valuable as you claim it to
be, they should be paying you, not vice versa, in which case money
shouldn't be a serious obstacle.
.