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From: Mark Thornton <m.p.thornton@ntlworld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.advocacy,comp.object,comp.lang.ada,misc.misc
Subject: Re: Using Ada for device drivers? (Was: the Ada mandate, and why
 it collapsed and died)
Date: Wed, 07 May 2003 20:37:47 +0100
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Date: 2003-05-07T20:37:47+01:00
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soft-eng wrote:
> Preben Randhol <randhol+news@pvv.org> wrote in message news:<slrnbbi4li.9l5.randhol+news@kiuk0152.chembio.ntnu.no>...
> 
> 
> 
>>I don't think the reason for the high usage of C is only a merit of the
>>language itself, but also to a great extent the inertia.
> 
> 
> No doubt, but how do you think C became popular in the
> first place, overcoming the inertia (that was then) in favor
> of Fortran, Cobol, and Pascal?

None of those langauges competed in the area in which C initially gained 
popularity --- systems programming. The main system programming language 
at the time was probably still assembler. The more general use of C came 
later --- after it had established a foothold.

Mark Thornton