On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 1:49 AM, Rick Stevens <ri...@nerd.com> wrote:
I was on the ANSI C committee for a brief time when C was being spec'd > out back in the late '70s and early '80s. Our company was an early > adopter of Whitesmiths' C on Vaxen and PDP-11s. PJ Plaugher of > Whitesmiths was the first secretary of the committee. > > <rumination style="big_grin"> > PJ had an interesting take on things. I remember that Whitesmiths > version of the now-standard "atexit()" function was called "onexit()". > When reading the man page, the prototypes for the arguments were really > mucked up. In the "Bugs" section of the manpage, he said, "...the type > definitions defy description and are still wrong." Also, forgetting > the terminating null in the source string used with their "cpystr()" > (now "strcpy()") function was deemed "mildly perilous." > </rumination> > > Technically C++ grew out of AT&T Bell Labs' Cfront, which was an OOP > pre-processor for C. The combination of C and Cfront was often referred > to as "C with classes". > > When C++ was first being codified formally it was called "Incremental > C". Since "++" is the C increment operator, the name sort of fell out > serendipitously. First it was cute, then the lightbulb went on with > "Hey, that's a GREAT name for it!" I remember discussions as to whether > a follow-on language would be called "D" or "P" (since the roots of C > are based on the old BCPL language). > > C# is Microsoft's implementation of C++ with some extensions (mostly the > ".NET" crud). It is more-or-less compatible to ANSI C++, but not > completely. Microsoft seems to have a horrible aversion to using > industry standards (ADS is a subset of LDAP, for example, but they'll > never say so). > > Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? > A: None. They redefine darkness as the standard. > > Now, looking at things such as Java...does anyone else remember a rather > noble but failed experiment called "UCSD P-System Pascal", championed by > Nicklaus Wirth in the '80s? Same idea, compile to some bizarre, byte- > code version of the source and have a target-specific interpreter to > act as a virtual machine to execute the byte-code. So Java certainly > isn't revolutionary, or even a very new idea. > > Perhaps P-Systems' failure was due to not having gobs of memory or fast > processors to implement the virtual machine at that time and that Sun > Microsystems wasn't behind it as they were with Java. > > Anyway, that's my contribution to the discussion. > > (donning my flak jacket and flame-retardant suit for the inevitable > missiles that will be hurled in my direction) > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > - Rick Stevens Nice, you also seem to have nice experience. -- Regards, Parshwa Murdia
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