Olin Lathrop wrote:

> K+R were in a research setting where they didn't have to care about
> profit or competitive advantage.  They had nothing to loose by
> letting everyone at it, =


They were in a commercial venue, porting Unix from PDP-7 to PDP-11. This =

is the reason why they created C, as a sort of a portable assembler. =

(This wasn't a research project, it was commercial -- they wanted to =

sell the PDP-11 :) Wirth created Pascal at the ETH in Z=FCrich; not more =

commercial than AT&T, it seems, perhaps less :)

I don't think there's a big difference in balance between research and =

commercial compiler writers between C and Pascal. I think it wasn't =

until the early 80ies that the first commercial Pascal compilers showed =

up (Watcom, Apple, Borland). Until then, it seems, they were all created =

by universities. And after then, there were just as many commercial C =

compilers. =


> Of course there were standards, but companies opening their
> proprietary operating systems and large programs like compilers was
> certainly not the prevailing way things were done.

Right. But IMO this hasn't much to do with C's popularity or Pascal's =

lack thereof. I think the main reason is that there was, from the 80ies =

on, pretty much /one/ C but many (incompatible) Pascals. A compiler =

writer didn't have a clear road to follow for compatibility. The =

standard wasn't suitable and not popular anyway, and then there were the =

many proprietary and diverging dialects.

>> There is also an ISO standard for the original Pascal that dates back
>> to 1983. But it seems that this standard wasn't usable; for a number
>> of reasons, everybody implemented their own versions.
> =

> I'm guessing that didn't work because it was too late.  =


You probably didn't read up on the history, and on the standard itself. =

C wasn't standardized until later, so 1983 wasn't too late. The thing is =

that there doesn't seem to have been a consensus what makes a "good" =

Pascal, so there wasn't /a/ Pascal, there were many Pascals -- and all =

incompatible with each other. The only consensus, it seems, was that the =

standard isn't good enough, so Pascal programmers never seemed to have =

cared about standard conformance. Which is different from C; for the =

typical C programmer, standard conformance was always an issue. (First =

the K+R "standard", then the C89 standard. C99 is here, but not quite =

yet. Most compilers don't support it, so the kind of inofficial standard =

is still C89.)

> A lot of code existed in each version, so I'm guessing nobody wanted
> to have their code orphaned.  =


If this was the case, it was a bad decision, it seems -- rather than =

getting together, making some compromise, create a common and usable =

standard and live on, they wanted only their proprietary piece and died. =

This may be a lesson...

Gerhard

-- =

http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist