For immediate release

Cupertino, April 1, 2015

The C languages merge

To unite their growing communities and better meet the challenges from newer languages, such as Java and MatLab, the C languages have reached a formal agreement to merge.

Initially, the C and C++ ISO standards committees (WG11 and WG16) decided to unite as of Spring 2015 aiming for a joint C/C++ standard in 2016.

In a surprise move, the Objective-C leadership decided to join the new consortium. From their press release: “We are pleased to support this long-overdue initiative. Besides, with Apple putting their development money into Swift, we have lost our only support. We were just deciding to go independent and multi-platform when we heard rumors of the C/C++ merger and saw an obvious opportunity.”

A few hours later, feeling the pressure from JavaScript and C++, the C# designers declared their intent to join the C language melting pot: “With the performance and portability of C++ combined with the development environment of C#, the combined new language will be universal and unbeatable. We were going open source and cross-platform anyway. Most importantly, the opportunity to merge the efforts of the two Great Danes of programming language design is too good to miss.”

The remaining two members of WG4 (COBOL) decided that this offered a golden opportunity to renew COBOL: “By joining this new language, we can increase our appeal to the advertising-friendly demographic of programmers under the age of 70, and enlarge the COBOL presence in the mainframe market and beyond. We will be pleased to contribute from our vast intellectual property store of uppercase names to this exciting new effort.”

Several other languages, including Snobol, JavaScript, and Rust, inquired about membership but did not at this time meet the requirement of having a capital C in their names.

Academics and educators met the announcement with ecstatic outbursts, including: “We can spend years teaching all this!” (Chancellor, University of Tejas at Aston Martin) and “This opens a multitude of amazing new opportunities for academic dialects, research papers and industrial funding” (Dean, College of Computing, Del Monte University) and "Good luck with that!" (Registrar, Appl University).

The new consortium's first important language design task, already in progress, is to decide the name of the new language. "It is clear that the name must start with C, but beyond that there still isn’t agreement," said one person familiar with the matter but who was not authorized to speak publicly about the negotiations. "'C15' is considered too boring and might be confused with C. 'Objective-C#++' and 'C++++++' are too hard to pronounce, though everyone seemed to like 'C+++++' because it was considerably terser than both of those but unfortunately that one is syntactically malformed. The obvious 'Clang' is already taken by a related effort, and given their recent blitzkrieg-style expansion across this and nearby solar systems, we figured they didn't need more encouragement on their way to Local Cluster domination. 'C united' and 'Cucumber' are the current front runners, with votes split along party lines." The final decision on the name will be taken by vote at the first joint meeting in May 2015 in Chicago.

So far, no technical details about the merged language are available. Bjarne Stroustrup and Dennis Ritchie declined to comment, but were seen shaking their heads and muttering, “they’re nuts!”

Media contact: Clarence C. Cucumber (CCC@Clangsunited.org), Convener pro tem, C/C++/ObjectiveC/C#/COBOL joint development committee (soon to become ISO WG41)