far or near

[iwanttolearnc]

i was under the notion that far pointer or near for that matter had faded into oblivion with the arrival of FLAT MEMORY windows 9x.
but recently while going through some source code namely winsock.h and winsock2.h i saw it had plenty of far pointers . gethostbyname() for example returns a far pointer to a struct.At the same time msdn tells that far pointers are obsolete. PLEASE comment

[joe_bruin]

windows maintains compatibility with ancient apps by keeping the FAR and NEAR pointer naming convention. all modern applications use FAR pointers that are exactly the same as "normal" pointers.

[iwanttolearnc]

i tried using far pointers and got this error

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{

char far * a;
char s;
a =&s;
printf("%p\n",a);

}

error C4226: nonstandard extension used : 'far' is an obsolete keyword

if FAR is used instead there is no problem. i included windows.h

if i am not mistaken FAR gets resolved to far and far into nothing
windef.h does something like this

# define FAR far


if far is obsolete keyword the how is FAR handled

shouldint far be a legitimate keyword or is there more to it