Over on alt.usage.english there's currently a discussion on the
meaning of the word "deprecated". Its use in the C and C++
standards has been cited as an example of the historically
correct meaning.

That leads me to ask the committee members who may read this: why
did you choose use "deprecated" rather than "obsolescent"? Does
anyone know? If the word "deprecated" is part of the ISO standard
terminology, does anyone know why it rather than "obsolescent" is
used?

My understanding is that the point of labeling features
"deprecated" is that they may, or will, be obsolete in future
standards; is that correct? If there are features that are not
intended to be obsolete eventually, which are they?

(I'm not crossposting this to alt.usage.english; I have posted a
separate note there suggesting that interested persons can read
this thread. The thread in alt.usage.english is called, for
reasons that escape me, "Re: Deprecate [Was: Mornington
Crescent]".)

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
                http://www.mindspring.com/~brahms/
C++ FAQ Lite: http://www.cerfnet.com/~mpcline/c++-faq-lite/
the C++ standard: http://webstore.ansi.org/
more FAQs: http://www.mindspring.com/~brahms/faqget.htm

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Stan Brown wrote:
>
> Over on alt.usage.english there's currently a discussion on the
> meaning of the word "deprecated". Its use in the C and C++
> standards has been cited as an example of the historically
> correct meaning.
>
> That leads me to ask the committee members who may read this: why
> did you choose use "deprecated" rather than "obsolescent"? Does
> anyone know? If the word "deprecated" is part of the ISO standard
> terminology, does anyone know why it rather than "obsolescent" is
> used?

"Obsolescent" describes a fact, that something is becoming obsolete.
"Deprecated" expresses a desire that something will go away. It comes
from the latin 'deprecari', and means that we pray that something will
go away. But we know that prayers are sometimes not answered. For an
extreme example, consider java.lang.PrintStream, whose constructors were
deprecated in the Java 1.1 specification, and undeprecated in the 1.2
specification.

--
Pete Becker
Dinkumware, Ltd.
http://www.dinkumware.com

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