Comment by johnnyanmac

7 months ago

Most languages are much older than we think. But early adoption is a key to geting to that point of when to "trust it". D isn't that much younger than C and its variants, and older than C#. But it never quite got that adoption to really push development to the point of C#

3 comments

johnnyanmac

dfawcus 7 months ago

  C (K&R) : 1972 => 53 years ago
  C++     : 1985 => 40 years ago
  D       : 2001 => 23 years ago

Also, https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

So D is 30 years younger than C, so I'd disagree with "isn't that much younger".

D was really a reaction to C++, not C, so it is with C++ that it should be compared. The C like subset of D (BetterC) is much more recent.

johnnyanmac 7 months ago
I was thinking more about Ansi C. But fair enough. I hope the core point that these are all still Languages old enough to drink rings through.
- dfawcus 7 months ago
  
  Except ANSI did very little in terms of changing/enhancing the language. It stayed largely as it had been since Nov '78:
  Nov 78 Memo: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cchanges.pdf
  About all that happened with ANSI C was that prototypes were created (the major addition), type promotion rules were altered, plus 'const' and 'volatile' were added. ANSI also added 'void *'.
  I've a vague recall about 'void' existing in unix C compilers before that, having read a version of the above memo in a unix manual ('papers' section) and it mentioning 'void'.