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Message: [QUOTE="Chris Croughton, post: 2408865"] Well, for a couple of decades. How long has English been effectively the same? Or French? Or Icelandic? The latter is virtually unchanged from the Norse spoken by Eric the Red a millenium ago (it's had a few words added, and a few minor changes, but Eric would still be able to converse easily with modern inhabitants). And the fact that it hasn't caught on should tell you something about its usefulness as a language structure. Fine, you like strings, use C++ or Java (I do, when I want to do heavy string processing). But C is used in thousands of applications where string processing is not needed, or not in that form. Always becoming incompatible, so that programs are treated as "write only". What is it holding back? What machine features can not be accessed using C as it stands? Only if define a 'generation' as an increment of speed or size. Most of the really innovative designs (the Transputer, for example) have died because they were solutions in search of a problem, there was no actual ned for them. What hardware features are "driving software"? I can't see any which would need a radical rethink in software design. Indeed, the main features affecting software are the ones which support the 'sloppy' programming you dislike -- cheap fast big memory and processors, which let the software concentrate on design without having to program for the last byte and microsecond. Which means, in many cases, that it allows the design to be built without having to worry about the nitty-gritty of the implementation, by using standard easily testable building blocks. Like strings. Hold on, aren't strings one of the things you like? And while it does, that's what we're stuck with. There hasn't been a paradigm shift in hardware -- what I'd call a 'generation' -- since the 1960s, the basic principles and operations would be familiar to Turing (or even Babbage). OK, the speed and size of the hardware would boggle them (it boggles me on occasion, I grew up when a large mainframe had 64K words of core store and there were only a few of them in the whole country!), but that's only a matter of scale. The expected breakthrough hasn't appeared, te hardware is still growing only quantitavely. That being so, why should software be any different? I'm disappointed that the promised "neural network" systems seem to have not gone anywhere. I'm disappointed that cars are still essentially the same as the Model T (minor user interface changes) and we're still using fossil fuels for them. I'm disappointed that the politicians are still behaving like power-crazed brats. I'm disappointed that the space program hasn't progressed (indeed, has regressed in many ways). I'm disappointed that we still don't have fusion power. Life is full of disappointments, I'm afraid... Chris C [/QUOTE]

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