Comment by pjmlp

1 hour ago

They wanted to play and ignored other languages on purpose, that is all.

> Although we entertained occasional thoughts about implementing one of the major languages of the time like Fortran, PL/I, or Algol 68, such a project seemed hopelessly large for our resources: much simpler and smaller tools were called for. All these languages influenced our work, but it was more fun to do things on our own.

https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/chist...

Pity that in regards to secure programing practices in C, community also ignores the decisions of the authors.

> Although the first edition of K&R described most of the rules that brought C's type structure to its present form, many programs written in the older, more relaxed style persisted, and so did compilers that tolerated it. To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions.

Also to be noted that on Plan 9 they attempted to replace C with Alef for userspace, and while the experiment failed, they went with Limbo on Inferno, and also contributed to Go.

And that C compiler on Plan 9 is its own thing,

> The compiler implements ANSI C with some restrictions and extensions [ANSI90]. Most of the restrictions are due to personal preference, while most of the extensions were to help in the implementation of Plan 9. There are other departures from the standard, particularly in the libraries, that are beyond the scope of this paper.