comp.lang.c++

James Kanze

10/19/2008 5:22:00 PM

On Oct 19, 1:22 pm, Gennaro Prota <gennaro/pr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> James Kanze wrote:
> > On Oct 16, 11:28 pm, Gennaro Prota <gennaro/pr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> Pete Becker wrote:

> >>      [C headers]

> >>>> They're long since deprecated.

> >>> That is true. It is also irrelevant: they're not going to
> >>> go away, despite the wishes of some people early in the
> >>> standardization effort.

> >> Can't deprecation be "canceled" under ISO rules?

> > In theory, or in practice.  In practice, each version of the
> > standard is a new standard, and can make any changes it
> > wants.

> I see. You imply that, in theory, it couldn't be canceled?

Just the opposite. All it would take for the deprecation to be
canceled is for the committee to vote to strike the word from
the standard.

> Or that it would require some long workflow?

Any change in the standard requires a reasonably long workflow.
Removing deprecation would be a change like any other. The
formal workflow would be exactly the same as to change { and }
into BEGIN and END. (In practice, of course, it would probably
meet with a little less resistance in the committee. But I
don't know---Pete didn't say if the wishful thinkers were still
around and influencing things or not:-).)

>      [...]

> >> I'm far from sure but perhaps that's called "reinstatement"
> >> (even if the feature hasn't been removed yet). Another
> >> candidate for this would be strstream.

> > "Deprecate" already has a negative prefix; the opposite would be
> > precate, or perhaps since we're restoring a previous status,
> > reprecate.  Don't look for those words in the dictionary,
> > however:-).

> > (The word actually derives directly from a Latin word, which
> > meant to pray against.  [...])

> Yes, I know the etymology (BTW, terms of direct Latin derivation
> tend to be almost homographs to the Italian ones; and usually
> the Italian term is also the one used colloquially).

I figured as much, knowing that you know Italian (and went to
Italian high schools, where if I'm not mistaken, Latin is still
a required subject). But I suspect that that's not the case for
a lot of readers here.

> But I was thinking of ISO terminology. I guessed there was
> some companion document to

>    <http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg9/isodi...

> with definitions of the basic terms. In fact I must have read
> "reinstatement" in some ISO-related document somewhere. (Of
> course, "precate" would mean "to pray (for)", which isn't what
> the committee wants to express, either :-))

Yah. The smiley in my comments wasn't accidental.

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
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