Comment by pjmlp
10 years ago
On MS-DOS, Acorn, Amiga and Atari it was just yet another one.
On Mac OS (after the C transition), Windows and OS/2, they might had C as main implementation, but most of us that couldn't carry on using Turbo/Quick/HiSoft Pascal, Modula-2 or Basic compilers, moved to C++ instead.
We could still make us of improved safety and stronger type checking features, while being compatible with the C toolchains.
EDIT: Also IBM and Microsoft eventually had very good C++ support in the form of SOM, COM, C Set++ and MFC, with Borland providing the very good OWL and VCL.
Also any Windows 3.x old timer remembers the message and event handling macros alongside #define STRICT, that Microsoft used to bring some sanity to Windows programming with straight C.
On Amiga it was the only one of significance, as the API language. Having Lattice helped of course. Pretty much everything else was a toy in the early years.
Most significant DOS development seemed to be C.
On Amiga, on my part of the globe we only cared about Assembly, AMOS and GFA Basic. The OS was a mix of Assembly, BCPL and C.
On MS-DOS, on my part of the globe we only cared about Assembly, Turbo Pascal, Turbo Basic, Turbo C, Turbo C++ and Clipper.
C was hardly the only choice on MS-DOS.
All our stuff on demoscene related activities and game programming attempts were in Assembly and Turbo Pascal.
Intuition was all C, only DOS was BCPL, which made it a pain to do anything with. AMOS was one of the toys I mention - mainly popular for hobbyists and some bad released games (it never interfaced with the OS, being ST derived. That led to its many compatibilty issues). Most games from the houses I knew, or knew people at, were either a mix of C + 680x0 or pure assembly. In commercial software (GUI based) C was the vast majority.
On MSDOS I never said it was the only choice - there were many choices, but most commercial development seemed focussed on C. DB work often ended up on Foxbase or Clipper. Turbo Pascal and C were hugely successful but didn't catch MS C. Somewhat surprising given how slow early MS compilers were.
Of course if you were doing DOS TSRs or games you'd be much more likely to use assembly in the mix.
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