9 Feb
2017
9 Feb
'17
2:11 p.m.
Paul McJones <paul(a)mcjones.org> wrote:
There's more in Stroustrup's paper for the second History of Programming
Languages conference, http://www.stroustrup.com/hopl2.pdf
See especially the prehistory section 2.1 on page 3 where he talks about
the painful tooling he was faced with in Cambridge, where Simula was nice
for program design but had a woefully slow implementation, whereas BCPL
was fast but grievously unsafe.
The quote above is repeated in the HOPL2 paper on page 12 in section 2.4.4
on "Why C?" and there's a bit more about comment syntax in section 3.3.1
on page 21.
Tony.
--
f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ - I xn--zr8h punycode
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I'm
fairly certain it was originally in BCPL.
You could just drop a note to Bjarne Stroustrup and ask. :-)
On page 44 of _The Design and Evolution of C++_ (Addison-Wesley, 1994),
Stroustrup says:
“However, only C, Simula, Algol68, an in one case BCPL left noticeable
traces in C++ as released in 1985. Simula gave classes, Algol68
operating overloading, references, and the ability to declare variables
anywhere in a block, and BCPL gave // comments.”
He says a bit more about // comments on page 93, including an example of
how they introduced an incompatibility with C.