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Didn't BCPL and Algol heavily influence C though? What features of BCPL or Algol or other, older languages that were ignored could have made C better?
by meowface 12y ago
Didn't BCPL and Algol heavily influence C though? What features of BCPL or Algol or other, older languages that were ignored could have made C better?
- pjmlp 12y agoBCPL not much. It was barely an high level assembler. Now Algol, it had: - Bounds checked arrays - Reference parameters to functions/procedures - Real strings (not the first version in 1960 though) - Explicit conversions Quote from Tony Hoare's ACM award article[1]: "A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law." [1]http://www.labouseur.com/projects/codeReckon/papers/The-Emperors-Old-Clothes.pdf http://www.labouseur.com/projects/codeReckon/papers/The-Empe...