strangest systems I've sent email from

I forgot about PL/M... Not just telco's. Many (most?) people doing stand-alone applications want this, or something close to it. 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... 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