It is true there are new standards. But my reasoning remains sound even in light of this. Before I continue with this argument, I must first go back and reference the original argument, of which C was merely an example. My points of argument were the need for standards or not, and what kind of standards kill an new system. Thus, I will proceed: no single C syntactical element can change. This is a given. If it did, it would arguably no longer be C. Because things change, need syntaxes become a necessity. C cannot change its syntax to fill this need, because of specific standards about its syntax (not a bad thing, just an example). Thus, a new language must be created to fill this new need. Correct? Now, when the arguments in this thread are overlayed back onto the original topic: "Specific standards for Linux will surely kill it", one sees that this is true, because Linux, unlike C, changes daily, morphs and mutates to meet needs. This is one of its best attributes for me, not a sticking point. But new, rigid standards will make it a dead OS. People will still develop for it, but within constraints. People doing things differently from distro to distro is a pain, not only because they are lazy coders (or possibly visionaries), but because we do not want to separate the wheat from the chaff. We rely on "industry bigwigs" to hand down to us what is we should believe is best. Thus the art dries, the frontier ends, the poineer is forced to move on. Adam "We'll never survive!" "Nonsense, you're only saying that because no one ever has." -TPB >>> "Jeremy Fowler" 02/07/02 09:17AM >>> However your reasoning is flawed. People are still developing C to make it a better language. Hence my reference to C99, a new standard that supports many new features. So the C language is not a solid brick as you would believe. As soon as someone stops developing something, then it is dead; because it soon becomes obsolete. OS2, BeOS, MSDOS are good examples of dead software.