Obsolete? (was: Inlining -- what happened to the inline keyword)

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <2127 at dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright at dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes:
>In article <11032 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
><In article <2121 at dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright at dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes:
><<C is now mature, standard, and therefore obsolete.
><I generally agreed with your comments, except "therefore obsolete".
>Perhaps an analogy would help. As anyone who works on jet fighter aircraft
>design knows, as soon as you freeze the design in order to put the plane
>into production, it is obsolete. The reason is that the design stands still,
>while technological progress moves forward continuously.

Hm, this must be some new use of the term "obsolete".  I doubt that anyone
in a position to know would agree that the SR-71 or F-15E are obsolete.
On the other hand, the B-2 will rapidly become obsolete as the Soviet
radar system is changed to use non-colocated transmitter and receiver,
because the colocation assumption is built into the B-2 design.

Obsolescence has little to do with age.  It has to do with reduction of
utility.  C appears to me to have quite a stretch of continued utility
ahead of it, for example in implementing translators from new languages
into C as a portable intermediate language.  (C is not ideal for this,
but we have nothing better available.)