Re^7: Perl 5 interpreter

21 years is as near as damn it half the life of the industry. Can you imagine if say the car industry was still used technology from its half life?

Well, actually the car industry is a good example where C89 is still in use.

There is a lot of software in modern cars, and most is written in C. One of the requirements of the car-manufactors is that the software uses a safe subset of C. And this safe subset is defined by a de-facto standard called MISRA-C (Guidelines for the use of the C-language in critical systems). The current version of it is MISRA-C:2004. In the foreword of that standard you can read:

While producing MISRA-C:2004 the question of addressing the 1999 C standard arose. At this time only issues with MISRA-C:1998 are addressed due to limited support for C99 on embedded microprocessors.

So even if current cars contain high-tech features, those features are implemented using an 21-year-old-standard.

Backward compability to C89 is not as absurd as it seems!

Rata

Comment on Re^7: Perl 5 interpreter

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Re^8: Perl 5 interpreter by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Jan 12, 2011 at 10:25 UTC
Unless Perl is used on the systems--which almost certainly would not be allowed--that is no reason to limit Perl to that subset. Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error. "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.	[reply]