29 Apr
2016
29 Apr
'16
1:03 p.m.
On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 01:19:34PM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote:
;)
Indeed.
;)
Yes I knew this. ;) Pity they didn't get it right the first time.
I've had to fix some crufty old code in my time.
Still adding char to C I'd consider a PDP-11'ism.
From: Diane
Bruce
PL/M wasn't bad either.
I forgot about PL/M... Telephone companies preferred deterministic
behaviour from their code
and operating systems.
Not just telco's. Many (most?) people doing stand-alone applications want
this, or something close to it. There are many warts in C I would remove if I had
the power to. ;)
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...
Yep.
C is a high level PDP-11 assembler to this day.
(auto increment and
decrement)
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?")
I've read this many times. ;)
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").
I loved that it started out as a Fortran compiler that failed.
"After a rapidly scuttled attempt at Fortran,..."
In that era one had to have a highly optimized Fortran. ;) I remember
people writing text editors in Fortran and I saw one debugger
written in Fortran. It's a good thing it was rapidly scuttled.
Noel
Diane
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