Coincidentally I am just reading the <<Programming in Ada 2012>>, and found this in the introduction chapter: > C history ... The essence of BCPL was the array

Coincidentally I am just reading the <<Programming in Ada 2012>>, and found this in the introduction chapter: > C history ... The essence of BCPL was the array and pointer model which abandoned any hope of strong typing and (with hindsight) a proper mathematical model of the mapping of the program onto a computing engine. Even the use of := for assignment was lost in this evolution which reverted to the confusing use of = as in Fortran. Having hijacked = for assignment, C uses == for equality thereby conflicting with several hundred years of mathematical usage. About the only feature of the elegant CPL remaining in C is the unfortunate braces {} and the associated compound statement structure which was abandoned by many other languages in favour of the more reliable bracketed form originally proposed by Algol 68. It is again tragic to observe that Java has used the familiar but awful C style.