Comment by rswail
16 days ago
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...
Alone the fact that you mention RT-11/RSX-11 and VAX OSs shows we were not on the same bubble.
Anyway on VMS most folks would be found using the VMS BASIC compiler, VMS Pascal or Bliss, until Open VMS made it yet another UNIX clone.
My first C compiler used the RatC dialect, let alone having access to a proper K&R C compiler.
By 1992, I already had access to a proper C++ compiler on MS-DOS, and C was history to me, other than scenarios were work was expected to be done in C like some university assignments, even here we were blessed with a plethora of languages between Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk, ML, C, C++,....
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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.
I preferred "P" because of the BCPL ancestor.
If BCPL begat "B" and "B" begat "C", then "C" should have begatten "P".
Not sure if begatten is a word :)
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Of course, although Typescript for C++ is a more modern way to put it for younger generations.