> From: Diane Bruce
> PL/M wasn't bad either.
I forgot about PL/M...
> Telephone companies preferred deterministic behaviour from their code
> and operating systems.
Not just telco's. Many (most?) people doing stand-alone applications want
this, or something close to it.
> There are many warts in C I would remove if I had the power to. ;)
Eh, don't we all.
My favourite peeve: in cloning BCPL, they left out 'valof/resultis'. That
made certain kinds of macros really, really ugly...
> C is a high level PDP-11 assembler to this day. (auto increment and
> decrement)
This myth persists, but it's wrong. B (the typeless predecessor to C) on the
PDP-7 had them, before the PDP-11 existed, as DMR attests:
People often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and
auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix
first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no
PDP-11 when B was developed.
The document that's excerted from:
http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
might be of interest here, since it contains a section ("Whence Success?")
containing his take on why C was a success (e.g. "it evidently satisfied a
need for a system implementation language efficient enough to displace
assembly language, yet sufficiently abstract and fluent to describe
algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments").
Noel
