Not everybody agrees that C is dead and there is no further
development.
I have followed some number of your posts, and it seems to me that you
might be heading more towards where Walter Bright is going with his "D
language". It seems, like him, you want to make the language better
by virtue of semantic and syntactical changes, with true language
function augmentation.
My angle is different. There is a reasonable language hiding
somewhere in there, but it needs to be fixed. What I want to do is
plug all the stupid holes (start defining things that are currently
undefined), create a fully functional modification of the C library
that is fully re-entrant, have mandated runtime debugging assistance
and vastly expanded functionality for the heap, expose standard
functionality available on most modern CPUs (and which is otherwise
emulatable), redesign the file-IO for generic I/O (so that "FILE as
memory" emulation or sockets can happen fully at the library level)
and implement "one shot continuations" style coroutines into the
language. And fix glaring stupidities like ftell() and fseek() using
long as the file pointer offset.
In other words I just want to make the language to be a whole hell of
a lot better at doing what it already does today, and start making it
less suck at what it sucks at today. Most of what I want can be
solved with a better library alone.
But people are just satisfied with C for some reason. In the years of
posting here I have barely had any support for my point of view. It
kind of disturbs me that nobody cares about any of these issues. So
its not like any of this would ever make it into a proposal which
would be considered by the ANSI C committee. As they say and have
demonstrated themselves, they are concerned with putting a rubber
stamp on standard practice (totally ignoring the chicken and egg
problem inherent with this), and only venturing to do new things if
endorsed by some bizarre lobby that has absolutely no significant user
support (like MS's safe string stuff.)
You are in good company however.
Well I am *resigned* to the fact that nothing is going to happen.
Other people actually don't care and seem pretty happy with the status
quo.
In this group, the official position of the "regulars" is precisely
that:
no new development, back to C 1990, etc.
Well not exactly. They seemed really keen on complex numbers that put
them in direct conflict with the C++ standard. As long as it breaks C+
+ or has other anti-social effects, they seem more that willing to
adopt it.
I have tried (in this group and in comp.std.c) to argue against
that position. I can't say that I have succeeded.
Methinks there isn't a strong enough lobby for rationality in the
continued development of the C standard. And getting them to
acknowledge problems? I mean they are going to finally get rid of
gets() in the next standard. So they can no longer support any of
their prior claims that there was some good reason for it to be
there. They just have to admit, that they just left it in there for
18 years. Yay them for getting rid of gets(), but if that's how long
it takes, making the C library re-entrant is just never going to
happen.
