Fifty years

Fifty years

[W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)]

R. O'Keefe:
> Fifty years of programming research and we end up with C++ ???

Little known history of C ( and by inheritance, C++ ):

Back in those days, we had not developed "just-in-time" production,
so all items had to be produced ahead of time.  One couldn't predict
as well as today what would be needed when.  Therefore, it was inevitable
that the time would come when there was a shortage of characters, and
moreover, the quantity of each character was the same, even though
in most languages, nearly a hundred times more letters are needed than
punctuation marks and digits.  Faced with such a shortage, it stands
to reason that the marketing people would get first choice.  Thus,
programmers were left with most of the punctuation marks and digits.

It was quite an argument just to be allowed to name it "C" instead of "3"

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