On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 01:19:34PM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > 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. Indeed. > > > 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... Yep. > > > > 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. Yes I knew this. ;) Pity they didn't get it right the first time. I've had to fix some crufty old code in my time. Still adding char to C I'd consider a PDP-11'ism. > > 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?") I've read this many times. ;) > 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"). I loved that it started out as a Fortran compiler that failed. "After a rapidly scuttled attempt at Fortran,..." In that era one had to have a highly optimized Fortran. ;) I remember people writing text editors in Fortran and I saw one debugger written in Fortran. It's a good thing it was rapidly scuttled. > > Noel > Diane -- - d...@freebsd.org d...@db.net http://www.db.net/~db
