
The Development of the C Language - shawndumas
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html
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RiderOfGiraffes
Most of the work of my PhD thesis was done in BCPL. I was fluent in that when
I switched to it from Pascal in 1985.

I using Pascal (which I'd learned in my undergraduate CS course in 1980) to
write a game to play CoNeutron (although it was called Neutron then) for a
competition, when I found some bizarre behavior. I tracked down a bug in the
compiler and duly reported it. It was ignored, of course (compiler bugs are
never compiler bugs, but are always bugs in the users program - didn't you
know?) so I made an appointment to see Martin Richards.

I provided a 10 line program that demonstrated the bug, he ran it in the
system level debugged, and confirmed it. He then said - "Well, that won't get
fixed, why don't you use BCPL instead?" A naive translation into BCPL gained
me a factor of 10 in performance, and I was hooked.

Oh, and I won the tournament. Which was nice.

I later "progressed" to C, but still miss BCPL. It had it awkwardnesses, but
it had a certain charm.

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JoachimSchipper
I always find it amusing that C - the language which pretty much runs
_everything_ nowadays - still has broken precedence for the &/&& operators
because people didn't want to break backwards compatibility when there were a
handful of thousand-line programs written in it...

~~~
rtyhjukiujhygtf
There is a quote like that for make - they were going to fix the spaces/tab
thing but by then there were several dozen users

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sb
Just for the record (since I have recently stumbled upon and read up on the
BCPL stuff): Martin Richards web site at the University of Cambridge contains
valuable resources on BCPL (<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/index.html>),
including (relatively) recently updated manuals.

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dralison
Reading this I immediately turned to my bookshelf to confirm that my K&R book
was still there.

~~~
rtyhjukiujhygtf
It's still there - you just have to be careful because copies of K&R can eat
other language books left in range.

