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From: Tim Rentsch
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: encapsulating directory operations
Date: Tue, 27 May 2025 16:16:50 -0700
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Michael S writes:
> On Tue, 27 May 2025 16:23:22 +0200
> David Brown wrote:
>
>> On 26/05/2025 07:19, Peter 'Shaggy' Haywood wrote:
>>
>>> Groovy hepcat Tim Rentsch was jivin' in comp.lang.c on Fri, 23 May
>>> 2025 10:43 pm. It's a cool scene! Dig it.
>>>
>>>> C99 is just as stable as C90, and has been for well over a
>>>> decade.
>>>
>>> Methinks Tim is having trouble with his arithmetic. Either that
>>> or he doesn't know what year it is now. :)
>>> C99 was ratified in 1999, over two and a half decades ago.
>>>
>>>> C11 is just as stable as C90, and has been for just slightly
>>>> less than a decade.
>>>
>>> And C11 was ratified in 2011, no? That was almost a decade and a
>>> half ago.
>>
>> Tim was, I believe, taking into account the time it took for common
>> implementations of C compilers and libraries to have complete and
>> generally bug-free support for the standards, and for these
>> implementations to become common. C99 was published in 1999, but it
>> took quite a while before most people programming in C could happily
>> use C99 without worrying about the tool support being "experimental"
>> or not as mature as C90 support.
>
> I believe that your belief is wrong.
> It is much more likely that Tim took into account defect reports.
> Here is the list of C11 defect reports with the last dated 2016:
> https://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/summary.htm
>
> I did not find similar list for C99. However believing Tim I would guess
> that the last change in C99 document was made ~15 years ago.
You are partly right. Besides defect reports, there are TCs. And
there is always the possibility of future TCs, future defect
reports, or future changes for any ISO C standard while it is
still current.
To be as stable as C90, a C standard would need to be immune to
the possibility of such future changes.
I take C99 to have reached this level of stability in 2011, when
it was superseded by C11. I take C11 to have reached this level
of stability in 2017, when it was superseded by C17.