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I believe he was being sarcastic. And breaking backwards compatibility can be really bad. Imagine if the next version of C would break the previous one. How man

I believe he was being sarcastic. And breaking backwards compatibility can be really bad. Imagine if the next version of C would break the previous one. How many operating systems and critical software would have to be rewritten in order to be maintained.

cwyers 12y ago
Python is in a different boat than C++. If the Python language leaders decides to make a version that breaks backwards compatibility... well, they also make the most popular Python interpreter. The group responsible for the C++ standard isn't in the same position at all, they have to convince the different compiler groups (GCC,LLVM,Intel,Microsoft,etc.) to implement it for them.
- pmelendez 12y ago
  Agreed but even there were a monopoly for the interpreter/compiler you would see people marrying with a specific version and having the implementer to maintain two different branches of the compiler for security reasons.
Silhouette 12y ago
Imagine if the next version of C would break the previous one. How many operating systems and critical software would have to be rewritten in order to be maintained. I don't think the idea is to force existing software to be rewritten. It's to provide a clean break so that new software isn't saddled with the baggage of the old. Over time, most of the older software is retired or replaced, and the industry migrates to use the better tools with more and more projects. This seems a very reasonable strategy, as long as your ABI or equivalent interface specifications can remain compatible for the common subset of functionality, so that programs built using the new language can still use libraries written in the old one. (See also: Every successful general purpose programming language in decades has offered a FFI for C.) It doesn't work so well if you don't have proper formal standards for your old and new languages. It's also much harder to achieve in practice if your code is effectively running on some sort of virtual machine so you can't have that clean break at the ABI level, which might be one reason why several languages have failed to make a convincing big jump in recent years (Perl 6, Python 3, etc.).

cwyers 12y ago

Python is in a different boat than C++. If the Python language leaders decides to make a version that breaks backwards compatibility... well, they also make the most popular Python interpreter. The group responsible for the C++ standard isn't in the same position at all, they have to convince the different compiler groups (GCC,LLVM,Intel,Microsoft,etc.) to implement it for them.

pmelendez 12y ago
Agreed but even there were a monopoly for the interpreter/compiler you would see people marrying with a specific version and having the implementer to maintain two different branches of the compiler for security reasons.

Silhouette 12y ago

Imagine if the next version of C would break the previous one. How many operating systems and critical software would have to be rewritten in order to be maintained. I don't think the idea is to force existing software to be rewritten. It's to provide a clean break so that new software isn't saddled with the baggage of the old. Over time, most of the older software is retired or replaced, and the industry migrates to use the better tools with more and more projects. This seems a very reasonable strategy, as long as your ABI or equivalent interface specifications can remain compatible for the common subset of functionality, so that programs built using the new language can still use libraries written in the old one. (See also: Every successful general purpose programming language in decades has offered a FFI for C.) It doesn't work so well if you don't have proper formal standards for your old and new languages. It's also much harder to achieve in practice if your code is effectively running on some sort of virtual machine so you can't have that clean break at the ABI level, which might be one reason why several languages have failed to make a convincing big jump in recent years (Perl 6, Python 3, etc.).