Re: encapsulating directory operations

On 27/05/2025 17:10, Michael S wrote:

On Tue, 27 May 2025 16:23:22 +0200
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> 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.
 

That sounds like a more plausible explanation than mine.  You could say that my suggestion is "stable in practice", while the defect reports are "stable in theory".  I think "stable in practice" is of greater importance to most programmers, but I believe it would be more in character for Tim to emphasis "stable in theory".  In either case, I think it is fair to say that C99 and C11 are both very stable versions of C, and by now are just as suitable choices as C90 for most (but not all) purposes.