3 ms·
This is a grossly inaccurate description of computing at the time of the rise of C. C was competing with Pascal/Modula, BLISS, PL/I, BCPL, and so on, not assemb
by eschaton 6y ago
This is a grossly inaccurate description of computing at the time of the rise of C. C was competing with Pascal/Modula, BLISS, PL/I, BCPL, and so on, not assembly on punched cards.
The “C competing with assembly” meme was very specific to microcomputer game and operating system development, not more general microcomputer application development, and not to minicomputer or mainframe development.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoMainframes very quickly were outclassed by minicomputers. They could not respond quickly to technology changes as fast. C was indeed king for decades.
- int_19h 6y agoC was not without competition on microcomputers, either. A lot of DOS software was written in Pascal, for example - and it wasn't any slower for that.
- Turing_Machine 6y agoA lot of it was written in Turbo Pascal, which (among many other things that would have caused Niklaus Wirth to break out in hives) let you include inline machine code (and later, inline assembly language).
- int_19h 6y agoThat's true, but so did C compilers at the time. And most software didn't actually make use of it - they didn't have to, because Turbo Pascal had e.g. pointer arithmetic as powerful as in C. But anyway, we were talking about the real world software on microcomputers, not just standards in the abstract. With that in mind, I think TP/BP is a better example of Pascal in the wild than anything Wirth ever made.