From: Donn Miller <dmm125 AT bellatlantic DOT net>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Namespaces
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 00:06:05 +0000
Organization: Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions
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bstroustrup AT my-dejanews DOT com wrote:

[<snip>]
> 
> Actually, many (most) recently released compilers supports the "new stuff"
> such as namespaces and the STL (e.g. Borland, MS, G++, EGCS, EDG-based
> compilers). I describe Standard C++ rather than the most widely available
> subset, but I'm not that far ahead of what's shipping.
> 
>         - Bjarne
> 

I'm wondering now what will happen to plain C now that a lot of stuff is
being added to C++ such as namespaces.  Eventually, C will have to
"catch up" to C++ to some degree and implement namespaces as well,
especially if stdio.h is going to have namespaces.  C has added a lot of
C++ features over the years, such as:

const int a=5; so I've been using this in regular C instead of

#define a 5

Also, I've noticed a lot of C compilers will allow // comments in
regular C mode.  One thing I hate to see is in C++ code people are
afraid to use /*  */ comments, but they put a big multi-line comment
with // at the beginning of each line.

I think we'll see a lot of C++ stuff migrating over to C such as try and
catch.  Then the problem will be how to differentiate C from C++.  Like,
is the goal of C to be a sort of "C++-lite" without classes?  For
example:  if you do a lot of low-level hardware stuff and/or need a low
memory footprint and low CPU usage, then use C over C++.  But then again
C++ compilers are fast catching up to C compilers in terms of executable
size and speed, so the point may come where we may have to say "why not
just merge C with C++" since there's so much diffusion back and forth. 

-- 
Donn
dmm125 AT bellatlantic DOT net