Comment by pjmlp
16 days ago
All those limitations were sorted out in 1978 with Modula-2 and open arrays, aka spans.
What about the UNIX and C folks propaganda of C being the first systems language, or always focusing on the original Pascal used for teaching and not everything else that followed up with Mesa, Modula-2, Ada, Object Pascal and friends, none of them with said limitations.
C was specifically developed to allow Unix to be ported.
It was a systems programming language and the first well known/successful one.
There was BCPL and then B before that, which is why the language is called "C".
Pascal was considered a teaching language, along with "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" by Wirth etc.
The UCSD P-system was one of the first "IDEs" and used Pascal and a bytecode interpreter of the compiled code.
Modula-2 was barely available in the early 1980s.
Ada was mired in MIL-SPEC and expensive compilers etc.
People used FORTRAN for scientific programming, C for most everything else in the non-IBM mainframe world.
Successful systems languages trace back all the way to JOVIAL in 1958.
You missed quite a few between JOVIAL, and C being adopted outside Bell Labs.
Modula-2 was as widely available as C was outside UNIX and universities with access to UNIX source code.
It took a while for proper C to actually be "used for everything else", until the early 1990s actually, and by then anyone sensible would be much better with Typescript for C, aka C++.
I dunno, I was starting my career around 1980-81, and the choices were 6502/6509/Z80/8088 asm, C, UCSD-Pascal, and BASIC at the micro level, C/asm was the rule for RT-11/RSX-11 and then the VAX OSs at the "minicomputer" level.
I had a friend that tried to get everyone using Modula-2 but the "ecosystem" wasn't as great around the uni/ex-uni environments where I was.
C was pretty entrenched by the end of the 1980s, although I did use a weird embedded Pascal that was on HP-UX cross-compiling for Z80/8086 at the end of the decade, but they were the exception rather than the rule.
C++ was just a preprocessor for C and a "better C" at the time, people were still bitching about header files with function type signatures of "ANSI C" vs "good old-fashioned K&R".
We also tied onions to our belts...
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> Typescript for C
You mean "C with Classes", later to be replaced by "C++" (Stroustrup pick this as favorite from a list of candidate names he crowdsourced) as implemented by Cfront.
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