6 ms·

The Development of the C Language (1993)

57 points by dodders 11y ago

acqq 11y ago
Must see: the html behind the text.
- LukeShu 11y ago
  Why? Because it's tidy? It's formatted like troff input. I suspect that DMR wrote the document in troff, and had it convert to HTML.
  - Aloha 11y ago
    probably was - there has been automated conversion from roff to html for a while
  - btilly 11y ago
    More hints that this is true. This paper was presented at the Second History of Programming Languages conference, Cambridge, Mass., April, 1993. That's the same month that CERN decided to publicly release source for the very first web server and client. There is no conceivable way that DMR would have both found out about the web and chosen to write in HTML at that point in history. However at that point Dennis Richie had 20 years of experience with troff. The only other reasonable choice at that point was TeX. And the output looks nothing like what I would expect from TeX. So it almost certainly was troff.
agumonkey 11y ago
https://vimeo.com/132192250 https://vimeo.com/132192250
- acqq 11y ago
  For those like me who prefer slides: http://www.pvv.org/~oma/HistoryAndSpirit_NDC_Jun2015.pdf http://www.pvv.org/~oma/HistoryAndSpirit_NDC_Jun2015.pdf They are good!
bitcointicker 11y ago
I love C. Perhaps this is because it's the first language I was taught. It fascinated me. It was complex, it allowed you to do dangerous things, but once it clicks, its like an epiphany :-) I hardly use it much these days, it's much faster to get things done in python, ruby or perl. Unless you need performance. I guess its like an old song, listening to it brings back memories of what was going on in your life when you first heard it. Reminiscing about writing my first C programs brings back the same kind of memories. Do other people have the same feeling about the first language they learnt? Or is C really special? :)
- pjmlp 11y ago
  I was able to discover the power of system programming in higher level languages around 5 years before learning C, so it isn't any special to me.
  - FraaJad 11y ago
    curious... what languages did you use?
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      I was going to post his list of system languages that came before C (and were better/safer) but can't find his post. Notable examples, before or after C, are: Burroughs' ALGOL's their safer OS was written in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems#ALGOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems#ALGOL Modula-2 with its better readability and safety invented in Lilith homebrew system: http://www.cfbsoftware.com/modula2/Lilith.pdf http://www.cfbsoftware.com/modula2/Lilith.pdf Hansen's Concurrent Pascal was concurrency-safe in tiny runtime; Edison was C minimalism on same PDP-11 with cleaner, safer design http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/ http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/ Modula-3 had many C++ advantages, Modula-style safety, and without C's BS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3 Note: SPIN OS was written in it. Supported type-safe compilation and linking of code into running kernel for acceleration. PL/I was one of predominant languages. IBM's mainframe OS's were written in a version of it (PL/S). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I Ada was systematically and cleverly designed for safety against most issues. Still is: http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-secure/ http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-secur... Note: Army Secure OS (ASOS), MarteOS, and Muen kernel were written in Ada leveraging its safety properties. That should cover the ones that have been around since the 60's-80's. Doesn't even count functional-oriented languages like Common LISP, Schemes, or Standard ML. LISP had both OS's and CPU's made in it and for it. SML & Ocaml kicked ass in app correctness and compiler writing. Also ignored niche-specific ones like COBOL or Fortran that I thought weren't suitable for a C comparison. Safe, C variants were even made to address its problems: https://www.cs.uic.edu/pub/Main/PhDQualifyingExam/Sample4.pdf https://www.cs.uic.edu/pub/Main/PhDQualifyingExam/Sample4.pd... Note: Cyclone concepts got rolled into Rust. So some benefit there. There's also modern attempts like D, Go, and Rust that try to replace it to various degrees. Wirth's Modula work lives on in Active Oberon System and Go language. Almost all are moving in a direction with ALGOL68's features being the baseline. That there was better stuff before C on 1960's hardware suggests that people should've ditched it or fixed it up a long time ago when hardware limitations weren't holding it back anymore. And let it be known that those are the only reason C was designed how it was. BCPL author actually wanted an ALGOL variant but hardware didn't work well enough. Rest was accidents of history. More detail that stretches further back than OP in this link: http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG
pjmlp 11y ago
"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." Ignored until clang adopted static analysis as part of the compiler.
- gdwatson 11y ago
  I'm not sure that's fair. Clang has excellent warnings, but it's not as if no progress was made on that front between 1979 and 2007.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    I am not speaking about the tooling, rather the macho attitude in the C community towards static analysis.
neonscribe 11y ago
BCPL and B were untyped languages, where the fundamental unit of the language was a "cell" that could hold either an integer or a pointer. Also fundamental was that memory was addressable by cells, and that adding one to a pointer (which could also be an integer) must cause it to refer to the next cell. This could only be implemented efficiently on a word-addressed machine. When confronted with the byte-addressed PDP-11, they created a language where the basic unit was a "char". Fortunately, they also added types, so that the language could adapt to changing architectures. However, they were fortunate, or foresighted, in that virtually every architecture after the mid-70's was byte-addressable. C does not adapt well to word-addressed machines, but that didn't slow its adoption because word-addressed machines disappeared rapidly after C was born.

57 points by dodders 11y ago

acqq 11y ago

Must see: the html behind the text.

LukeShu 11y ago
Why? Because it's tidy? It's formatted like troff input. I suspect that DMR wrote the document in troff, and had it convert to HTML.
- Aloha 11y ago
  probably was - there has been automated conversion from roff to html for a while
- btilly 11y ago
  More hints that this is true. This paper was presented at the Second History of Programming Languages conference, Cambridge, Mass., April, 1993. That's the same month that CERN decided to publicly release source for the very first web server and client. There is no conceivable way that DMR would have both found out about the web and chosen to write in HTML at that point in history. However at that point Dennis Richie had 20 years of experience with troff. The only other reasonable choice at that point was TeX. And the output looks nothing like what I would expect from TeX. So it almost certainly was troff.

agumonkey 11y ago

https://vimeo.com/132192250 https://vimeo.com/132192250

acqq 11y ago
For those like me who prefer slides: http://www.pvv.org/~oma/HistoryAndSpirit_NDC_Jun2015.pdf http://www.pvv.org/~oma/HistoryAndSpirit_NDC_Jun2015.pdf They are good!

bitcointicker 11y ago

I love C. Perhaps this is because it's the first language I was taught. It fascinated me. It was complex, it allowed you to do dangerous things, but once it clicks, its like an epiphany :-) I hardly use it much these days, it's much faster to get things done in python, ruby or perl. Unless you need performance. I guess its like an old song, listening to it brings back memories of what was going on in your life when you first heard it. Reminiscing about writing my first C programs brings back the same kind of memories. Do other people have the same feeling about the first language they learnt? Or is C really special? :)

pjmlp 11y ago
I was able to discover the power of system programming in higher level languages around 5 years before learning C, so it isn't any special to me.
- FraaJad 11y ago
  curious... what languages did you use?
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I was going to post his list of system languages that came before C (and were better/safer) but can't find his post. Notable examples, before or after C, are: Burroughs' ALGOL's their safer OS was written in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems#ALGOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems#ALGOL Modula-2 with its better readability and safety invented in Lilith homebrew system: http://www.cfbsoftware.com/modula2/Lilith.pdf http://www.cfbsoftware.com/modula2/Lilith.pdf Hansen's Concurrent Pascal was concurrency-safe in tiny runtime; Edison was C minimalism on same PDP-11 with cleaner, safer design http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/ http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/ Modula-3 had many C++ advantages, Modula-style safety, and without C's BS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3 Note: SPIN OS was written in it. Supported type-safe compilation and linking of code into running kernel for acceleration. PL/I was one of predominant languages. IBM's mainframe OS's were written in a version of it (PL/S). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I Ada was systematically and cleverly designed for safety against most issues. Still is: http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-secure/ http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-secur... Note: Army Secure OS (ASOS), MarteOS, and Muen kernel were written in Ada leveraging its safety properties. That should cover the ones that have been around since the 60's-80's. Doesn't even count functional-oriented languages like Common LISP, Schemes, or Standard ML. LISP had both OS's and CPU's made in it and for it. SML & Ocaml kicked ass in app correctness and compiler writing. Also ignored niche-specific ones like COBOL or Fortran that I thought weren't suitable for a C comparison. Safe, C variants were even made to address its problems: https://www.cs.uic.edu/pub/Main/PhDQualifyingExam/Sample4.pdf https://www.cs.uic.edu/pub/Main/PhDQualifyingExam/Sample4.pd... Note: Cyclone concepts got rolled into Rust. So some benefit there. There's also modern attempts like D, Go, and Rust that try to replace it to various degrees. Wirth's Modula work lives on in Active Oberon System and Go language. Almost all are moving in a direction with ALGOL68's features being the baseline. That there was better stuff before C on 1960's hardware suggests that people should've ditched it or fixed it up a long time ago when hardware limitations weren't holding it back anymore. And let it be known that those are the only reason C was designed how it was. BCPL author actually wanted an ALGOL variant but hardware didn't work well enough. Rest was accidents of history. More detail that stretches further back than OP in this link: http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG

pjmlp 11y ago

"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." Ignored until clang adopted static analysis as part of the compiler.

gdwatson 11y ago
I'm not sure that's fair. Clang has excellent warnings, but it's not as if no progress was made on that front between 1979 and 2007.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  I am not speaking about the tooling, rather the macho attitude in the C community towards static analysis.

neonscribe 11y ago

BCPL and B were untyped languages, where the fundamental unit of the language was a "cell" that could hold either an integer or a pointer. Also fundamental was that memory was addressable by cells, and that adding one to a pointer (which could also be an integer) must cause it to refer to the next cell. This could only be implemented efficiently on a word-addressed machine. When confronted with the byte-addressed PDP-11, they created a language where the basic unit was a "char". Fortunately, they also added types, so that the language could adapt to changing architectures. However, they were fortunate, or foresighted, in that virtually every architecture after the mid-70's was byte-addressable. C does not adapt well to word-addressed machines, but that didn't slow its adoption because word-addressed machines disappeared rapidly after C was born.