*An excerpt from an EETimes article, titled:* C link remains frayed in
hardware design flows

*(*http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=172300899*
)
*

The first question to ask is why C should be such a ubiquitous tool in
hardware design in the first place. It is certainly not suited to the task,
either by history or by nature. Originally, as any septuagenarian programmer
knows, C came from the same Bell Labs culture that produced, more or less
concurrently, Unix. The hardware available to engineers at Bell Labs in
those days was primarily PDP-11s. And in fact, C was originally conceived as
a means of generating PDP-11 assembly code quickly.

This is not to confuse C with high-level languages (HLLs), which were
actually quite advanced by that time. The direction of HLL work in those
days was to find formalisms in which algorithms could be expressed precisely
and concisely, eliminating by grammatical rules and by construction the most
common errors in computer programming.

The result of this work ranged from languages that emphasized elegance and
concision at the expense of all else, such as APL, to those that emphasized
clarity and correctness at the expense of elegance. Among the latter
category were Algol, Pascal and PL-1.

*In a hurry*
|C attempted nothing of the sort. It was intended as a compromise-an attempt
to sharply reduce coding time while maintaining, as much as possible, the
clever tricks that a generation of assembly language PDP-11 programmers had
learned. Time proved that approach to be a brilliant compromise. The point
that the Bell Labs folks understood, but that mainstream language developers
missed, was that programmers didn't really care about clarity, correctness
or even, in most cases, elegance. They wanted to be cute, and they were in a
hurry.

So what does this have to do with hardware? Two coincidences. First, a
coincidence of birth: In an abstract sense, both modern RTL design and
PDP-11 assembly language are register-transfer languages. There are huge
differences-one describing how data is transformed as it flows between
registers under the control of state machines, and the other describing how
data is taken from registers, transformed and replaced under control of a
sequential program. But fundamentally the two are describing similar
formalisms.

The second coincidence involved the decision of Bell Labs to grant to the
academic community very easy license access to Unix. At a time when PDP-11s
were inexpensive platforms but DOS-11 and VAX VMS were expensive production
operating systems, this caused Unix-and with it, C-to spread like an
airborne virus throughout the academic community in the United States. The
result: Fortran and Basic died, and every engineering student in North
America learned C.
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