22 Sep
2015
22 Sep
'15
6:31 p.m.
On 09/22/2015 03:49 PM, Diane Bruce wrote:
On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 04:35:24PM -0400, Paul Koning
wrote:
http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/expotape.htm
OK, Paul needed to read more closely. (Think I got the
attribution right...)
This is Dennis Ritchie speaking about Ken Thompson:
Anyway, it took him about a day to realize that he
didn't want to do a Fortran compiler at all. So he did
this very simple language called B and got it going on
the PDP-7.
So, B was never actually a FORTRAN compiler, just Ken
started thinking about FORTRAN grammar and within one DAY
took off in a different direction. By that time (1969 or
so) FORTRAN was a really old language, and considered way
out of date by most universities' Comp Sci departments.
Jon
And Unix was no different, 'C' started out as a Fortran compiler.
Really?
"citation needed".