>From: Byron A Jeff <byron@CC.GATECH.EDU>

>Actually I have a different take on it: C really isn't suitable for
>embedded systems programming. It's a general purpose language applied to
>the task.

Afaik C is a systems programming language and was designed as such and for
that purpose. They did not actually know what kind of (PDP) system it was
for so they made some features up on the way. It cannot be an accident
that 90% of the operating systems in common use are written in C or some
dialect thereof. It is not pretty and it allows you to rummage in the
gearbox at will. That's what makes it so different from other 'beautiful'
languages which are less good for systems programming for various reasons.

I think that the highly portable nature of C is due to the machine
independent 'structured assembly language' concept they had to use to
accomodate the wildly varying instruction sets of the PDP machines and
other monsters they were using at the time.

>The students in my Language Design and Implementation class are taking a
>first crack at such a language. In the next couple of weeks we'll be
>soliciting

I think that this is a great learning experience but my comments to the
new language can be summarized in two words:

VHDL and Prolog

However, I'm just a guy.

Peter

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