Nekochan Net

Will he be buried at C?

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Land of the Long White Cloud and no Software Patents.

I C what you guys did there. . .

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"Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a
pyramid with thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?"

Actually portability wasnt an original design goal, so it was written in assembly in the late 60s. I think in the early 70s, it was rewritten in C (and some asm) to make general changes and enhancements easier to do (including changes for new PDP configurations). Then in the late 70s, someone realised it might be possible to port the kernel to Interdata, and once that was done, the shell and utilities would be a fairly straightforward recompile.

Portability was really just an afterthought, but UNIX was a successful proof of concept for portable OSes (along with OS6 and SOLO). So from then on, people started trying to make kernels portable from the start. BCPL, B and Z were used in OS6, TRIPOS, Thoth and probably others, but C obviously became the language of choice due to the spread of UNIX.

You are very right. The *original* assembler version of UNIX was ported to another machine in only 1971 [from the PDP-7 to the PDP-11/20; merely 40 years ago]. The "Second Edition" [1972] was written in B [which derived from BCPL]. Due to B's limitations, Ritchie went on to develop C [probably a failure by todays standard]. Afterwards [in 1973], the UNIX system was rewritten in C - since then we are stuck with a rather unflexible environment. I'm not sure I'd consider that a blessing today.

That's like saying that a Volkswagen Beetle is unsafe by todays standards. Or, actually (since C is some 40 years old): a Ford Model T.

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Now this is a deep dark secret, so everybody keep it quiet
It turns out that when reset, the WD33C93 defaults to a SCSI ID of 0, and it was simpler to leave it that way... -- Dave Olson, in comp.sys.sgi
Currently in commercial service: (2x)
In the museum: almost every MIPS/IRIX system.
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No. Sorry, you are really quite wrong- you apparently didn't get what I meant...

Sigh, here's the story directly from the creator's mouth:


http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html

(Before the nitpicking gets out of hand.)

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"Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a
pyramid with thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?"

... pray, where was I wrong?

where did I say you were wrong?


I just wanted to get the tangential nitpicking pissing context over so this thread could get back to its original intent.

Cheers

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"Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a
pyramid with thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?"

From what I read recently, one derivation of TRIPOS had the last few lines of BCPL removed from it a handful of years ago, its all C and PowerPC assembler now.


No. I was just regurgitating something I had read a few days prior. I've never been to New Jersey and I wasn't involved so I don't know. I was just merely attacking the "chicken and egg" thing which bothers me for some reason.



R.

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死の神はりんごだけ食べる

開いた括弧は必ず閉じる -- あるプログラマー


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If C is a failure by today's standards then I would happily accept failure. Complaining about C's inability to do something like complaining that a Model T-Ford was not suitable for use as a lunar lander module.

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Land of the Long White Cloud and no Software Patents.

I deeply apologize. Back to the original thread. Just re-read the "Unix Programmer's Manual, Volume 2". Of course, without Dennis we wouldn't be there where we are now...As I said before, I bow before him.

Programming languages only teach you not to want what they cannot provide. C is no exception.

C was defined before multithreading, object orientation and exception handling, yet all of these can be done in C. The C language was deliberately kept small with the view that everything else gets added as libraries etc. Given that 99% of language compilers, intepreters and operating system kernels are built using C, then C isn't doing a bad job.

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Land of the Long White Cloud and no Software Patents.

I am not entirely sure. Years ago I looked at an old version of povray source code. They had object-orientated code in C by use of structs and function pointers. I have seen functional programming in C++ with template meta-programming.

I think this may have drifted from the topic of one of the creators of UNIX and the C programming languages passing.

There is a long list of thing you can do in C that you can not do in C# or Java. I still have a lot of respect for the designers of the language.

Exception handling in C:



Something to be said about workmen and the tools they have at their disposal.

R.

_________________
死の神はりんごだけ食べる

開いた括弧は必ず閉じる -- あるプログラマー


J5600, 2 x Mac, 3 x SUN, Alpha DS20E, Alpha 800 5/550, 3 x RS/6000, Amiga 4000 VideoToaster, Amiga4000 -030, 733MHz Sam440 AmigaOS 4.1 update 1.

Sold: Tandem Himalaya S-Series Nonstop S72000 ServerNet.

@PymbleSoftware
Cortex ---> http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cortex-th ... 11?sk=info
Minnie ---> http://www.facebook.com/pages/Minnie-th ... 02?sk=info
Book ----> http://pymblesoftware.com/book/
Github ---> https://github.com/pymblesoftware
Visit http://www.pymblesoftware.com
Search for "Pymble", "InstaElf", "CryWhy" or "Cricket Score Sheet" in the iPad App store or search for "Pymble" or "CryWhy" in the iPhone App store.