Re: encapsulating directory operations

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:

On Tue, 27 May 2025 16:16:50 -0700
Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> wrote:
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Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:
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On Tue, 27 May 2025 16:23:22 +0200
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:
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On 26/05/2025 07:19, Peter 'Shaggy' Haywood wrote:
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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.
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C99 is just as stable as C90, and has been for well over a
decade.

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   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.
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C11 is just as stable as C90, and has been for just slightly
less than a decade.

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   And C11 was ratified in 2011, no?  That was almost a decade
and a half ago.

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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.

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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
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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.

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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.
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To be as stable as C90, a C standard would need to be immune to
the possibility of such future changes.
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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.

>
Got it.  Stability occurs when the standards is fenced from
changes by presence of the next edition.
Stability by obsolescence.

Right except the word obsolescence is not appropriate.  The release
of C99 doesn't make C90 either obsolete or obsolescent.  It is
possible that a given earlier edition of C will become either
obsolete or obsolescent, but it isn't the release of a subsequent
edition that does that.  Stability happens when a subsequent edition
is ratified, regardless of when or whether an earlier edition ever
becomes either obsolete or obsolescent.  No edition of C is now
obsolete, nor do I expect any of them will be during our lifetimes.