From -7930136981806981717 X-Google-Thread: f78e5,6294651cbc4b105c X-Google-Attributes: gidf78e5,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!local01.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.speakeasy.net!news.speakeasy.net.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 09:50:04 -0500 Return-Path: X-Authentication-Warning: mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU: fjh set sender to devnull@stump.algebra.com using -f X-Robomod: STUMP, ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov) Delivered-To: std-c++@ucar.edu From: kanze@gabi-soft.fr Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ Subject: Re: C++ standard life cycle Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <1124962740.444680.27940@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com User-Agent: G2/0.2 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020920 Netscape/7.0,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com; posting-host=62.160.54.162; posting-account=qsfl8gwAAABZGaLp2a7FeTfDkJamzWYW X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at ucar.edu Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by mailman.ucar.edu id j7P9dbNC011464 X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at cs.mu.OZ.AU Approved: Fergus Henderson , moderator of comp.std.c++ X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at cs.mu.OZ.AU Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 09:45:28 CST Lines: 50 NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.182.171.162 X-Trace: sv3-39OxFJK3aTzrEjNvEhxVl+wQ/anDLHmnCQfSyj/dJGuSuhlNSMrFyVfXPWcdnPqnNnQj0H21BXZrOS5!RnWWiJZJxXuJzBN9qtnM5+AhCRJLp9Mks8Qz4kj24hZ6BPLfWs7r32goPvXGbIHapnRzvNst/Dmy!Rio2PiI1zMTqaZyEqjDahG9EFgcMFttFiph3+je8YA== X-Complaints-To: abuse@speakeasy.net X-DMCA-Complaints-To: abuse@speakeasy.net X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.32 Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.std.c++:1924 Francis Glassborow wrote: > In article , > John Nagle writes [...] > I think all your data demonstrates is that some languages > become so important to some communities that they are willing > to fund ongoing work. If I were a betting man, I would lay > good odds that C++ will still be around and under continued > development in 2020. I think that Plauger hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that averages don't mean much when there is a strong variance. Note that in some African countries, the "average" lifespan is something like 45; the difference, when compared to North America or Europe, isn't that a lot of people die in their fourties; the difference is that there are a lot more infant deaths -- if half of the population dies in their first year, and the other half lives to 90, that makes an average of 45. I suspect that there is a similar phenomenon in programming languages. Some languages fail to attain a critical volume of code, and for all intents and purposes die. Once the critical volume is reached (e.g. the case of Fortran or Cobol), however, the language effectively lives forever. (At least in name -- modern Fortran has very little resemblance to Fortran IV.) In the case of C++, I don't think that there is any doubt that the critical volume has been reached. The case of C is an interesting one. There, too, I don't think that there can be any doubt that the critical volume was reached. If C dies, it will basically be because C++ has been able to subsume it -- the C compatibility of C++ means that much C code is almost C++ code, migrating it to C++ (and thus reducing the effective volume) is affordable. So C could conceivably be an exception to the above. -- James Kanze GABI Software Conseils en informatique orient�e objet/ Beratung in objektorientierter Datenverarbeitung 9 place S�mard, 78210 St.-Cyr-l'�cole, France, +33 (0)1 30 23 00 34 --- [ comp.std.c++ is moderated. To submit articles, try just posting with ] [ your news-reader. If that fails, use mailto:std-c++@ncar.ucar.edu ] [ --- Please see the FAQ before posting. --- ] [ FAQ: http://www.jamesd.demon.co.uk/csc/faq.html ]