From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 10261c,90121986704b5776 X-Google-Attributes: gid10261c,public X-Google-Thread: 109fba,4873305131bf4d94 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: fdb77,4873305131bf4d94 X-Google-Attributes: gidfdb77,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,4873305131bf4d94 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 10c950,90121986704b5776 X-Google-Attributes: gid10c950,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,4873305131bf4d94 X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public From: kaz@helios.crest.nt.com (Kaz Kylheku) Subject: Re: English SUCKS, Chinese is the only language you need!! Date: 1997/11/19 Message-ID: <64vlef$fju$1@helios.crest.nt.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 291002407 References: <34557f2b.1934172@news.mindspring.com> <347067B8.46@lysator.liu.se> <34722BF5.5B6D@le.ac.uk> <34733969.13D5@gsg.eds.com> Organization: A poorly-installed InterNetNews site Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.java.advocacy,comp.lang.pascal.ansi-iso,comp.lang.pascal.misc Date: 1997-11-19T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <34733969.13D5@gsg.eds.com>, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz wrote: >Dr E. Buxbaum wrote: > >> I always thought C WAS the PDP-11 macro assembler! > >No; in fact, C was original done on a more primitive machine, the PDP-7. No it wasn't. The language that Ken Thompson developed for the PDP-7 was called B. C was developed by Dennis Ritchie using the PDP-11. There is a myth surrounding >While the ++ and -- operators were clearly inspired by the equivalent >macine instructions, the C preprocessor has less expressive power than >the macro facility of any assembler that I am familiar with. That is a myth which is false. The ++ and -- operators were in the B language that was implemented on the PDP-7, which had no such instructions. They are an invention of Ken Thompson alone. The PDP-7 did actually have some auto-increment memory cells. While they may have suggested to Ken the idea for these operators, they were not used in their implementation. C inherited its ++ and -- operators from B, and not from the PDP-11 instruction set as the widespread myth would have it. >It might be fair to say that C is BCPL, although I would consider that >there were too many changes from BCPL to B to C for me to defend such a >claim. There are similarities between C and BCPL, but that can also be said of C and . One chief differece is that BCPL is not byte oriented but cell oriented. Pointers are unscaled and reference cells, not individual bytes. The meaning of a cell depends on the applied operation. Individual bytes are packed into cells, and are referenced using special operators that take into account the packing. This is quite different from C's comprehensive type system, byte oriented nature, and pointers that automatically scale (not to mention vast differences between the syntaxes).