31 Aug
2017
31 Aug
'17
10:37 p.m.
On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au>
wrote:
Professor Knuth seemed to manage OK, writing TeX and METAFONT in Pascal
(using his literate programming toolset, but that did not extend the
language much).
Indeed - problem was it was in a PDP-10/20 *flavor* and would compile on
a Vax, without *much* hacking - I know I moved it once. It was a real
PITA. Eventually folks would migrate to C implementations.
I suppose Apple's Pascal and Object Pascal -- used for Lisa and
Macintosh applications and systems software -- comes under the "so
people fixed it" category?
That was the issue, everyone 'fixed it' and the fixes were all all
different. Eventually market place pressure of the PC made Turbo Pascal
enough of a standard because so many people were using it, but by that
time, the war had been lost.
All the things Brian points out that made C great, made it the language
commercial folks used for both the PC and UNIX.