Re: [TUHS] History of popularity of C

On 23 May 2020 13:08 -0400, from clemc(a)ccc.com (Clem Cole): There's also the issue that, even once you get into compiled BASIC territory, those wretched vendor-unique extensions show up again. Try porting, say, a non-trivial program written for QuickBASIC to Turbo BASIC even on the same PC. Both Pascal and BASIC are hard to extend by the programmer who's actually using them to try to write useful end-user software, _particularly_ in ways that fit into the rest of the code, so you're essentially stuck with what the compiler vendor thought you would need, or what they thought you would be willing to pay for, in memory or money. On the flip side, much of C's magic really isn't in the language (which is quite, pardon me, basic), but rather in the standard library. Yes, C('s standard library) ended up with its share of vendor-specific extensions as well, but the language itself actually gave the programmer the building blocks needed to, if necessary, even implement those extensions for a different compiler; most often without resorting to more than minimal amounts of assembler, and often outright none. So you weren't stuck with what the compiler vendor gave you; it was actually possible to effectively _extend_ the language vocabulary yourself, if you felt a need to do that. I didn't do serious enough programming back during those days for that to matter to me, but now that I get paid to write software, I definitely come across situations at times where the ability to extend the language in such a manner (and have the code using those extensions read idiomatically for the language) is awful nice. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”