>    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.
>       :
>    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.

I think C was pretty obviously targetted toward the PDP11.  There are
constructs that map directly onto PDP11 architectural features...

Let's not get revisionist, either.  It was "ages" (more than 10 years?)
before C was widely in use on anything BUT PDP11s.  It never hit the PDP-8
at all (AFAIK), wasn't particularly usable on the PDP-10 till after that
architecture's nominal lifetime, and BLISS was heavilly pushed for the Vax.
C was available for CPM machines, but was not a big success.  Much Apple
Mac Software was written in Pascal dialects, and C wasn't used "much" on
Wintel systems till the 386 processor fixed the architectures to be more
C-friendly.  C popularity on microCONTROLLERS postdates THAT - a relatively
recent phenomena indeed.

In a sense, this is the RISC revolution at work.  The way I interpret it,
the idea behind RISC is not to make processor architectures any more
complex that compiler technology can generate good code for (which is
a bit different than just reducing the number of instructions.)

BillW

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