On Oct 25, 2008, at 6:23 AM, Olin Lathrop wrote:

>> As far as I know, no other language comes close to these features.
>
> A number of other languages could do that.  It is only the  
> prominence of C
> that has kept them from wider use.

The evolution of C has been interesting.  These "other languages" you  
mention mostly started at about the same time as C, but somehow failed  
to "catch on" to nearly the same extent.  Turbo Pascal pre-dated Turbo- 
C, and the early state of C compilers for non-unix systems was  
basically awful.  And yet, here we are...

I think I blame the simplicity of C for its success.  While "standard  
pascal" was a pretty useless beast, and you needed "proprietary  
extensions" to make it useful, C was so *bare* that you could move it  
anywhere.  No standard libraries, no I/O capabilities in the language  
itself; you could just plunk C right on top of whatever operating  
systems calls your computer or CPU happened to support (and many did,  
and early multi-OS C programs are incomprehensible constructs of  
conditional compilation (and it's not clear to me that the current  
open source "./configure" business is much better!)

So C showed up and flourished on MSDOS, 68000, CPM, DecSystem20, and  
on and on, while the Pascal folk (just for example) were still arguing  
about whether Borland or Apollo was heading in the right direction...

BillW

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