> given. but do you have a consensus of the community that this > feature is not worth including? i haven't even heard but from a few > people saying that "it's not worth it because if it was, 'we're the > ones to have thought about it'".
No, that's not what people are saying. It's important to take a high-level view of programming language design, including the role of the "community". As Robert pointed out, proposals look a lot different when you get down into the details. One of the most complex issues in programming language design is the interaction between features. You can often have two features that seems quite simple individually, but have quite complex interactions. As Ian says in a later message, one issue with your proposal is that of how it interacts with cross-compilation. The hard part of programming language design isn't to come up with ideas for what to add to a programming language, since there are always dozens of them, but which ones make sense to add. For example, strict typing and built-in range checking are well-understood to be important language features, especially for safety-critical environments. But nobody would suggest adding them to every programming language. Deciding which things to add to a language isn't generally done by looking at whether the thing is a "good idea" or even if it's "useful to the community", but by looking at the effect that adding it would have on the language overall. A large part of that takes into account the complexity and culture of the language. A language like C is meant to be very simple, with very few features. That's why there have been so few new features added to it in recent decades. On the other side, a language like Ada has numerous features, so every five years or so, a number of new features get added. But even there, significant care has to be taken as to what makes it in: many good ideas don't. In order to consider adding a new feature to a programming language, especially one like C that's been so stable over recent decades, the threshold is FAR higher than that the feature be "useful" or "nifty". What you're hearing, from some of the best people in the world to make such a statement, is that what you propose doesn't come close to that threshold. You need to accept that. > computing science (may i call it a science??), is all about objectivity > and examining the theories and evidence. it should be prepared re-examine > everything when a new idea is introduced or challenged. You are confusing programming language design with CS research. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of ideas from other programming language which are quite well accepted as valuable. But that doesn't mean that it makes sense to add any of them to the C programming language.
