>> 4) it's incredibly portable.  I've used C on machines with
>>  8-bit to 36-bit to 64-bit wide native word sizes.  Pascal
>>  has the contructs of a decent language but having a good
>>  Pascal compiler available on a new client's system(s) is
>>  _much_ more problematic.
>
> This is a bit of a circular argument. C is popular because it is  
> portable
> and it is portable because it is popular.

But...  It wasn't.  When I was in college (<1981), Pascal was much  
more popular than C.  I mean, C was a unix-only language for all  
practical purposes, and unix was HARD-TO-GET.

People were taught Fortran, PL/1, and APL (!) as general purpose  
languages.  The PDP11s ran DEC operating systems, and Pascal was the  
up-and-coming "teaching language."   Everyone wrote a pascal-like  
compiler in their compiler class.  The microcomputers all ran BASIC.   
There was *A* C compiler for CP/M, but you had to get it from one of  
those weird hole-in-the-wall companies.

When the IBM/PC came out (1983) it had Fortran and Pascal compilers  
long before there was a commercial C compiler.  In 1987 when cisco  
started up, commercial unix systems running on 68000 were just  
appearing, but the only C compiler around was based on "the portable C  
compiler", which was pretty sucky.  Borland C for the PC came out  
about the same time as the first versions of gcc for 68k.  Microsoft C  
probably showed up in about 86.

C was originally developed in 1972.  So that's something like *15  
years* that C, as a language, languished in relative obscurity while  
the best and the brightest put forth their alternative Excellent  
Languages: PL/1, Pascal, Common Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Modula-2,  
APL, etc, etc, etc.  They taught the languages to students an they  
pushed them on their mainframes (I had some passing experience with  
the IBM "everything should be written in PL/1 instead of Fortran OR  
Cobol" agenda.)  And yet, today it appears that C won the war?  Why?   
I dunno.  But I think I can claim that it isn't entirely that C  
"succeeded."  All those other languages *FAILED*...  (There are  
probably important lessons about something in that.  But I don't think  
anyone learned them...)

BillW

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