strangest systems I've sent email from

[Diane Bruce]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 01:19:34PM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > 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.

Indeed.

> 
>     > 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. 

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.

> 
> 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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