Hi Fred, Thank you for your precisions.
But comme on, the quoted article "http://fgouget.free.fr/fun/CScandal.shtml"; is just a joke, I'm pertinently aware that the C language was not a first April prank (and I know it preceeded Pascal)! All I wanted to say is that on my opinion the only intrinsec qualities of a programming language/technology are not enough to grant a long live. Hardware manufacturers need programming languages/technologies with specific qualities, namely portability, and major hardware manufacturers play an important role for the popularity of a programming language/technology. Anyway, it is a good point you brought that precisions. I think we lack a real "IT History Enciclopedia" beyond the spare articles available on the Web. Regards, mihai Undisclosed-recipient a écrit : > On Oct 30, 5:00 pm, Mihai DINCA <mihai.di...@free.fr> wrote: > >> ... >> > > As a greybeard who lived through this history I have to correct some > of your misstatements. > > > >> I personally loved Pascal - a perfect programing language to be learned >> and to be used. It's limits were largely compensated by genial >> implementations (anyone remember the most famous "TurboPascal" and its >> direct child "Delphi"?). >> > > Niklaus Wirth's Pascal (essentially derived from Algol-60 with some > additions like enumerations) was never intended to be more than a > pedagogical instrument, to teach undergraduates the fundamentals of > procedural programming back in the heyday of structured, before object- > oriented programming which added data abstraction (data hiding, > separation of interface from implementation) and inheritance caught > on. > > It was also in the era before widespread prevalence of GUIs. Graphical > programming was a natural fit for OO, even with the fact of event > handlers coming from containment hierarchies, rather than > inheritance. > > There were many successors that sought to improve on Pascal and had > some success: Modula and Concurrent Pascal in academia, and of course, > the US DoD's standard language Ada. > > The problem with what you call "congenial implementations" was that > they all extended the language to make it more suitable for real-world > applications. These extensions were all same but different. That is, > they did similar things differently, and thus were incompatible, with > the result that programs were not portable, and that was in an era > before the commoditization of hardware and software, long before > today's monoculture. > > PC's of the day were hobbiest machines. CP/M was in vogue. IBM had yet > to jump into the PC market. Apple's Macintosh was years away. 30 years > truly was a long time ago. > > > >> However, the language that succeeded was the >> "C" language, a sort of a caricature of Pascal (see for example and for >> funhttp://fgouget.free.fr/fun/CScandal.shtml). Why C? C was developed >> by a hardware company, DEC (Digital Equipments Corporation) in tandem >> with Unix in order to offer an easily portable platform. >> > > That's factually incorrect. First, C came before Pascal. Second, DEC > had nothing to do with it; Unix and C both came out of Bell Labs. The > folks involved did it as a bootleg project to support their officially > sanctioned (and funded) task, which was to produce software to control > a phototypesetter, the venerable blue box from Compugraphics, which > had four carriers to hold four font master films and optically exposed > photolithographic media to make offset masters for printing. Different > sizes of a font face were obtained by adjusting the magnification > before exposing a letter.) Unix was created to support the TROFF (and > NROFF) markup languages, and C was the implementation language for the > whole ball of wax. TROFF's limitation of at most four different > typefaces on a page comes from the inherent limit of the Compugraphic > hardware. > > In fact, they did use a mini-computer from DEC -- something bigger > than a PDP-8, but before the PDP-11, which came later, although they > did move to it, especially after the model 45 came out, PDP-11/45, > with floating point hardware and virtual memory. But that connection > with DEC was incidental. Google for more. > > (The name "Unix" was a reaction to Multics, a research OS from MIT > implemented on IBM mainframes in IBM's PL/I language. Multics was > intended to be secure and robust through its innovation of "rings of > security: based on "capabilities," which is what today's access > control lists are derived from.) > > Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie designed C and Unix; their book > "The C Programming Language" is a classic, as are other books to come > out of that environment: "Elements of Programming Style" (Kernighan > and Plauger), Software Tools (Kernighan and Plauger) and "The Unix > Programming Environment" (Kernighan and Pike). > > C++, on which C# is based, was created by another Bell Labs > researcher, , who added notions of inheritance from Simula-67. > > There were other projects that added OO to C, notably Brad Davis's > Objective-C (C and Smalltalk tied together with a string -- C except > inside brackets that were not subscripts, Smalltalk, with the ability > to refer to C variables), which would be a footnote in computer > history had Steve Jobs, who after his ouster from Apple, not used it > in the NeXT system because it's the best there was at the time. > (Objective-C predates C++.) When Jobs came back to Apple, he killed > Darwin, Apple's then next-generation OS and got Apple started on what > became OS X, which at its core combined NeXTSTEP, implemented in > Objective-C, with the Mac GUI. > > It's true that C# benefited from the experience of Java, but on the > downside, it carries forward some of C's liabilities, including the > pre-processor. (Bjarne Stroustrup used to begin his introductory talks > about C++ by saying: > > I have good news and bad news for you about C++. > They're the same. C++ is based on C. > > </Fred> > > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java EE (J2EE) Programming with Passion!" group. 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