4 ms·

Pascal came out in 1970; C in 1972...

garmaine 8y ago
C dates to 1969. It was used to write Unix, the first release of which was 1969. http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html EDIT: I'm guessing you're getting this factoid from Wikipedia? Looks like an error. The quote it references as justification of the origin of C is misinterpreted. Thompson tried to write an operating system ONLY in C prior to 1972, but failed. Very early Unix was a mixture of C and assembly. Later versions, which Ritchie is referencing, used assembly only for the parts you really can't specify in C -- the boot loader and interrupt handlers. C was kinda a work in progress between 1969 and 1973 (see above link), and still after as it transitioned from K&R C to ANSI C. But there were releases accompanying Unix before it stopped drastically changing circa 1973.
- acqq 8y ago
  > C dates to 1969. It was used to write Unix, the first release of which was 1969. Wrong. Early Unix was written in assembly, the machine was too small for anything else and moreover C didn't exist then. From the DMR's chist link (1) that you also refer to: "Dennis Ritchie turned B into C during 1971-73" Even B was definitely not used to write the Unix of 1969-1973, but only run on it: "On the PDP-7 Unix system, only a few things were written in B except B itself, because the machine was too small and too slow to do more than experiment; rewriting the operating system and the utilities wholly into B was too expensive a step to seem feasible." Unix kernel was rewritten from assembly to C only in 1973: "By early 1973, the essentials of modern C were complete. The language and compiler were strong enough to permit us to rewrite the Unix kernel for the PDP-11 in C during the summer of that year. " The first Pascal compiler existed in 1970 which was inspired by Algol 60. Wirth was in its "Working Group 2.1" in 1964. (2) Wirth published an article about Pascal in ACM in 1971. Finally, in the Go language (from 2009), in which Thompson was also involved, the declarations follow more the Pascal spirit than the C spirit. 1) http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html 2) http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/recollections-about-the-development-of-pascal/ http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/recollections-abou...

C dates to 1969. It was used to write Unix, the first release of which was 1969. http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html EDIT: I'm guessing you're getting this factoid from Wikipedia? Looks like an error. The quote it references as justification of the origin of C is misinterpreted. Thompson tried to write an operating system ONLY in C prior to 1972, but failed. Very early Unix was a mixture of C and assembly. Later versions, which Ritchie is referencing, used assembly only for the parts you really can't specify in C -- the boot loader and interrupt handlers. C was kinda a work in progress between 1969 and 1973 (see above link), and still after as it transitioned from K&R C to ANSI C. But there were releases accompanying Unix before it stopped drastically changing circa 1973.

acqq 8y ago
> C dates to 1969. It was used to write Unix, the first release of which was 1969. Wrong. Early Unix was written in assembly, the machine was too small for anything else and moreover C didn't exist then. From the DMR's chist link (1) that you also refer to: "Dennis Ritchie turned B into C during 1971-73" Even B was definitely not used to write the Unix of 1969-1973, but only run on it: "On the PDP-7 Unix system, only a few things were written in B except B itself, because the machine was too small and too slow to do more than experiment; rewriting the operating system and the utilities wholly into B was too expensive a step to seem feasible." Unix kernel was rewritten from assembly to C only in 1973: "By early 1973, the essentials of modern C were complete. The language and compiler were strong enough to permit us to rewrite the Unix kernel for the PDP-11 in C during the summer of that year. " The first Pascal compiler existed in 1970 which was inspired by Algol 60. Wirth was in its "Working Group 2.1" in 1964. (2) Wirth published an article about Pascal in ACM in 1971. Finally, in the Go language (from 2009), in which Thompson was also involved, the declarations follow more the Pascal spirit than the C spirit. 1) http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html 2) http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/recollections-about-the-development-of-pascal/ http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/recollections-abou...