So you don't like the smell and your solution is to put them in something equally if not more smelly?

If you goto a school that gives credit for classes that simply teach a programming language (any language) then you are not at the right school. Most (if not all) good schools teach the concepts the course is trying to impart and you are expected to learn the language as an aside to the course. At best they'll spend a week on the language itself. My school also had language only courses, but we got no credit for them. Learning a language is trivial, mastering the idioms and proper use takes years of full-time practice (e.g. a full-time job).

I hope your requirements aren't as vague as your post. I don't have a clue what your post is asking or intending to say. The only clue is "Thanks for letting me get distracted". If that was the intent, then you've succeeded.

I think you should look at this as an opportunity to improve your design skills. If his changes are a pain to change in your current design then your design can use some improvements. Don't just get it working with his latest and greatest idea, improve the design with each iteration to make the changes trivial. Learn what worked and didn't work each time you need to change the design. You will learn a lot taking this approach. It is not too often that developers have the opportunity to redesign things as frequently as it sounds like you are getting to do.

Noam Sigal wrote:

it requires very careful planning, and deep knowledge of the specific compiler implementation. Especially where hard real-time is concerned

Working with any hard real-time system always requires very careful planning, regardless of language. It has been my experience that if you are using a *real* real-time OS then most of that deep knowledge is not required. I'll grant you that my assessment may be off about the level of compiler knowledge required as I have been doing this so long. But, those types of issues are usually not specific to a compiler. They are more related to having a general knowledge of how compilers, the language, the OS and generally how computers work.

Noam Sigal wrote:

Few people really realize the simple elegance and easy maintenance possible with C

I could use a lot of words to describe C, but "simple elegance" and "easy maintenance" would not be in any list that I would ever create. Maintenance is the main reason people left C. How many times has changing a variable in one place broken something seemingly unrelated somewhere else (and thus not retested) when coding in C?

tom1443 wrote:

We tried C++ here, built a few overpriced and unmaintainable products and dropped it.

To successfully switch from C to C++, you absolutely must understand and properly use OOP. At least for the core infrastructure at a minimum. Otherwise you end up with overpriced and unmaintable products as you get all the problems that come with structured design AND OO design if you do not. Don't blame the language for lack of skill on the developers part. There is absolutely no reason that C++ can't be successfully used in an embedded system short of having a lack of development tools for the particular embedded environment. There are just some extra details that an embedded developer needs to be concerned about (in particular memory management). C++ has been used on many embedded systems requiring the 5 9's availability level. With that said, there are some applications that are just more suited to structured development where C programming has a role, like drivers and algorithms.