dave porter wrote: > I recall reading something from Dennis Ritchie to the effect > that if he'd been able to get hold of a BLISS compiler he > wouldn't have bothered to invent C.
The quote the above reminded me of was: https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf Where Ken Thompson wrote (when he got the Turing prize): I suspect Daniel Bobrow would be here instead of me if he could not afford a PDP-10 and had to "settle" for a PDP-11. The closest I've found Dennis' name to BLISS is: http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/10/on-dennis-ritchie-a-conversati.html Kernighan told me that Ritchie was always conscious of the benefits of using minimal resources. Much of what he did was a reaction against the systems he was working with when creating Unix with Ken Thompson (a reaction to the Multics operating system) and C (a reaction to the PL/1 language that Multics was based on). EPL, Bliss, and especially BCPL were more positive influences on C. The things that made C successful not only inspired languages and systems that followed, but kept C a serious contender even after they were developed. _______________________________________________ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
