Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: encapsulating directory operations
Date: Tue, 20 May 2025 13:42:52 +0200
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <100hprs$276m9$1@dont-email.me>
References: <100h650$23r5l$1@dont-email.me>
 <87ecwj1vy9.fsf@nosuchdomain.example.com> <100hi99$260c5$1@dont-email.me>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Injection-Date: Tue, 20 May 2025 13:42:54 +0200 (CEST)
Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="069efaba5e4bb5c3d86fec5b828db5c3";
	logging-data="2333385"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/Cz6XJMgkKQW/Iq75Nh3Oyn5wRqd/0HrE="
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/102.11.0
Cancel-Lock: sha1:RgU40I1TdMcrJoTxrAafgA+y3wM=
In-Reply-To: <100hi99$260c5$1@dont-email.me>
Content-Language: en-GB
Bytes: 2152

On 20/05/2025 11:33, Richard Heathfield wrote:
> On 20/05/2025 10:18, Keith Thompson wrote:
>> C90 will never be extended.
> 
> And for that reason it will always be valuable. Stability has a value 
> all its own.
> 

Sure.

Similarly, C99, C11 and even C17 are stable and are valuable because of 
that stability.  It's good that developers have, to a fair extent at 
least, an option to pick their stable point for their projects.

It is actually not the fact that C has had stability in its standards 
that is valuable.  Python 1.0 has not changed - it is stable.  What 
makes C different as a development language is two things - modern tools 
continue to support old standards, and new standards are, to a very 
large extent, compatible with the old standards.

And this also means that "extending C90" (or any other C standard) is an 
oxymoron, counter to the whole point of standards, and the antithesis of 
why C has remained popular (or at least useful) for so long.