Re: One other possible reason for the C predominance

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Yannick Duchêne wrote:
> So C, as language, became something to which architectures adapted,  
> instead of the opposite.

Not sure about that.  I think the hardware architectures became
simpler and more orthogonal simply because the cost of memory was
dropping, such that compactness of executable code became less and
less of an issue.  The trend continued with RISC.

> 1) This means C was finally never proved to be good at expressing these
> layers

In fact, C is bad because it assumes a uniform memory architecture and
a flat address space.  These assumptions were OK for a few decades but
nowadays, GPUs with dedicated memory are a common case of non-uniform
memory architectures; the Cell processor and the rise of massively
parallel supercomputers is another.  Ada has storage pools to
represent this kind of thing.

> 2) This means C was finally a precursor of the virtual-machines + abstract
> virtual-machines-dedicated-languages fever we actually have.

No, C was not a precursor; Lisp ("discovered" in 1954) was.  Lisp even
produced a hardware architecture optimized for running Lisp bytecode,
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine.

I don't think C was a precursor at anything, really.  It was, and
still is, a hack.

--
Ludovic Brenta.