One other possible reason for the C predominance

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Reading at some stuff, I've just learned somethings about C's story, which  
make me think this may be one other possible reason for the C  
predominance. If you read it carefully, you may notice the same story  
could possibly occurs with Ada in turn in the future.

In a short summary, it makes the assumption C was not so badly designed at  
first and was even an abstraction, which became more and more suited as  
the time was going. Obviously, this is not the case anymore (not as much  
well suited as it was), but the author witness it reached an hight level  
of suitability, when the Intel's i386 came into life… just notice that  
this architecture is still actual, just think about all of those Unices or  
Linux application still built to target the i386 (Debian still do  
nowadays). So this “language of the past” was a language of the future,  
and just became a language of the past, “recently”. Yes, I know, this is  
not an excuse for its flaws about typing and tasking, but this is still  
worth reading to get a picture, and to see how possibly Ada could have the  
same story in the future (unless virtual machines are going to shadow it  
and be the next bad answer… I'm really afraid of that in the mean time).

Read this :
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch04s03.html
The last part titled “Case Study: C Considered as Thin Glue”

-- 
Si les chats miaulent et font autant de vocalises bizarres, c’est pas pour  
les chiens.
“ c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */ ” [Anonymous]