Hi All-- Mike Meyer wrote: > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > As other have noted, C was never really used for everything. Unix > tools were designed to connect together from the very beginning, which > is what makes shell scripting so powerful. This was true before there > was a C. Likewise, some things you need more control over the machine > than you get in C - those are still done in assembler. These days, C > compilers let you embed assembler statements in your C, so some of > these things are done in such variants. >
It really was used "for everything"; C compilers have *always* let you include assembler, with the "asm" keyword. Unless you're talking about the early days of DOS/Windows compilers, about which I know little, but all *K&R* compilers had asm. If you wanted to write kernel code and device driver code (including disk drivers) for large Unix systems, asm was a requirement. To put it in perspective, for Gould systems in the 80s, for the entire OS (BSD-derived Unix), there were under 100 lines of assembler, all in a very few device drivers (multiple thousands of lines of code, don't remember exactly how many). And living with structs instead of classes was not nearly as much of a pain in the butt as you make out; it was perfectly reasonable to include methods within structs, by including a pointer to a function. X10 and X11 showed just how object-oriented you could get with C, using callbacks with required signatures, and specifying how Widgets were to be written--contracts before there were contracts. It's true that OO languages are better, and languages like Python which allow you to combine fairly low-level calls with an OO worldview make life *vastly* easier, but C is still hugely flexible, highly adaptable, and very powerful. For about 10 or 15 years there, knowing C was pretty much a guarantee of a good job. That changed when C++ compilers became common and good and not merely preprocessors that wrote really, really ugly C. Metta, <while(*s++=*p++);>-ly y'rs, Ivan;-) ---------------------------------------------- Ivan Van Laningham God N Locomotive Works http://www.andi-holmes.com/ http://www.foretec.com/python/workshops/1998-11/proceedings.html Army Signal Corps: Cu Chi, Class of '70 Author: Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
