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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,9ca52c8981c1b86a X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,CP1252 Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!d28g2000yqc.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Ludovic Brenta Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: One other possible reason for the C predominance Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 06:09:01 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 153.98.68.197 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1300799341 11983 127.0.0.1 (22 Mar 2011 13:09:01 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:09:01 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: d28g2000yqc.googlegroups.com; posting-host=153.98.68.197; posting-account=pcLQNgkAAAD9TrXkhkIgiY6-MDtJjIlC User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009012111 Red Hat/3.0.6-1.el5 Firefox/3.0.6,gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:19331 Date: 2011-03-22T06:09:01-07:00 List-Id: Yannick Duch=EAne wrote on comp.lang.ada: > Read this :http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch04s03.html > The last part titled =93Case Study: C Considered as Thin Glue=94 So in essence, C survived and thrived because it provided a layer of abstraction that was not locked to contemporary hardware. Big deal. Lisp, Pascal and Ada did and still do the same (better, actually). I don't think that was the driving factor for the dominance of C. The driving factors were: (1) ease of implementation; (2) availability of no-cost, open source compilers that came with UNIX; and (3) bad judgment by programmers who used C outside its intended application domain (i.e. programmed entire applications instead of low-level OS kernels and utilities). Lisp failed to thrive because it is not easy to implement well (it needs garbage collection, generics, tail call optimization, a large library, an efficient virtual machine, etc.) and Ada because it lacked both ease of implementation and no-cost compilers. Pascal had both ingredients but still lost to C because its standard library was less versatile. And because of its use of bounded-length strings, perhaps. -- Ludovic Brenta.