C history / was Re: newbie building a scratch-built computer

Apropros of not much, but to ensure this is on-topic, I never hear B or BCPL mentioned, the ancestors of C, and even 'closer to the machine'. <<<< B is certainly very little known nowadays. I think the only compiler that had much circulation was that for GCOS (and possibly Multics?) on the big GE/Honeywell mainframes. I think that compiler came from the University of Waterloo. When we (at City University, London) had a Level 66 system we wrote almost all of our utilities in B (the Honeywell tradition was to use the assembler, GMAP - but we only ever wrote 3 modules in that ... the 3 modules that were necessary for control of access and accounting). I think a truly honest appraisal of the origin of C would be more complex than BCPL -> B -> C. For a start BCPL was a simplified version of CPL intended for systems programming; B is best seen as taking PL/I and transforming it in the same way as CPL became BCPL (ie take out any expensive implicit conversions and anything else that needed massive runtime) B and BCPL were ideal for word-oriented machines, but the arrival of character-addressing made them somewhat clumsy and so C essentially became a rewrite of B for such. So I would include PL/I in C's family tree. [also many people knew how to do semi-system-dependent tricks in Fortran for system programming and C - in its K&R form - gave these people similar opportunities] CPL, incidentally, was intended as a successor to Fortran IV and Algol 60 combining "the best features" of both, just as PL/I was similarly trying to replace Fortran, Cobol, and Algol 60. Algol 68 was a different attempt to provide an "Algol with fewer mistake" but the pendantry of the precision of declarations was enough to put most people off. Oh, and we don't talk about ADA (!) :-) Andy No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.476 / Virus Database: 269.11.2/931 - Release Date: 01/08/2007 16:53