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From: James Kuyper <jameskuyper@alumni.caltech.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2024 14:08:32 -0400
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On 9/16/24 13:13, David Brown wrote:
> On 16/09/2024 18:19, James Kuyper wrote:
....
>> The C standard is also incapable of being wrong, but in a very different
>> sense - the C standard defines C, there is no alternative to compare it
>> with, in order to say that the C standard is wrong. The C standard might
>> be inconsistent, unimplementable, badly designed, or incomprehensible,
>> among many other defects if might have - but as the official definition
>> of C, it cannot be wrong.
>> Any such defects can be corrected by filing a defect report and
>> convincing the committee that the report is correct. If they agree, the
>> next version of the standard is likely to contain revised wording to
>> address the issue. Try doing that with the Bible.
> 
> At the risk of offending people, I'd say this /has/ been done with the 
> Bible countless times.  There are dozens of major versions of the Bible 
> with different selections of books and sections of the books.  There are 
> hundreds of translations for each version, even counting just 
> translations into English, based on different source texts and very 
> different styles of translation.  And that's before you get to major 
> re-writes, like Mormonism (though perhaps that's more akin to moving 
> from C to Rust).

There's a key difference: there's a central authority responsible for C,
the ISO C committee. Defect reports must be filed with them, and new
versions of the C standard are issued by them.

The different versions of the Bible that you refer to generally
correspond to schisms in the community of Believers, with one version of
the Bible accepted by one side of the split, and a different version by
the other side, with neither side accepting the authority of the other
to determine which version is correct.

The authority for the Bible that corresponds to the C committee for the
C standard should be God, but to an atheist like me, it's not clear that
He's playing any active public role in clarifying which version of the
Bible should be used. If He's taking any active role, it would appear to
be in the form of telling individual Believers which version they should
believe, with different Believers reporting having gotten different
advice from Him on the matter.

> Unlike C, it is not a nice linear progression with each new version 
> superseding the previous versions.  But we still do see some "C90 
> fanatics" that are as convinced in their viewpoint as some King James fans!

The C90 fanatics do seem to be a good analogy to the Christian
schismatics. They basically don't accept the authority of ISO to change
the C standard, despite the fact that it became a standard under ISO
auspices. However, they are not organized into a coherent group like the
schismatic churches have been.