Tamas Rudnai wrote:

>> The point is: was language design and compiler technology advanced
>> enough at the time so that an efficient compiler could be made with
>> reasonable effort that could have made it possible to create
>> efficient OS code with the Pascal of the time? If so, why hadn't
>> anybody written a suitable Pascal compiler in 1969 (when development
>> of C started) that could've been used?
> 
> I think the answer is that because by that time an OS was written in
> Assembly and for everything else you used Algol pretty much (and
> Cobol). But I remember that early 80's I was already programming in
> Turbo Pascal 3 on the Z80 Softcard (the Z80 based CP/M expansion card
> by Microsoft on an Apple II). For a very long time Turbo Pascal on
> CP/M and later on on MS-DOS was very very popular. 

This is exactly my point -- actually two points :) 

Turbo Pascal was very popular. At some point, it probably was the most
popular development environment on CP/M and MS-DOS. I think the main
reason why it didn't "take over" like C was the lack of standardization
and the proliferation of dialects.

The other point is that this was in the early 80ies -- ten years too
late for what C was developed for, and (as Bill pointed out) on machines
that were vastly superior to what C was developed for.

Gerhard
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