1 Mar
2023
1 Mar
'23
8:50 a.m.
On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 02:07:06AM +0000, Ronald Natalie wrote:
The first chapter of K&R was out as a technical
paper at least a year prior
to the book coming out.
By the time the book had come out, there had already been some evolution in
the language. The “Phototypesetter” and soon after “Version 7” versions
of the compiler were heading toward what would be come ANSI by the time BDS
came out.
The background to BDS C is described in an interview with Leor Zolman
http://www.znode51.de/articles/int4.htm
"I wrote the first cut of BDS C between January and April, 1979,
specifically in order to compile a C version of the Othello game written
by Robert Halstead at the Real-Time Systems Lab at MIT"
Amusingly, I ended up working for an unrelated company called BDS and ended
up with the BDS.COM domain. Eventually, we changed the name of the company
and after brief inquiry from them donated the BDS.COM domain to the compiler
guys.
At least it didn’t come with a prayer book like the Metalware compiler
(which really needed all the divine intervention that it could get).
MetaWare High C, used by AIS/AOS on the PC RT
------ Original Message ------
From "Rich Salz"
<rich.salz(a)gmail.com>
To "Dave Horsfall" <dave(a)horsfall.org>
Cc "The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Date 2/28/2023 8:21:42 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: Any Bell 8-bit UNIX Efforts?
> >
> > I'm glad that you qualified it with "for the time"; I've
used it, and
> > calling it a "C compiler" was a bit of a stretch[*]. Later on I
> > bought
> > the Hi-Tech C compiler, and it was full ANSI, with function prototypes
> > etc.
>
> Hmm. K&R publication date was February 1978. BDS C was released in
> August 1979. So it was certainly C as known at that time. X3J11 was
> convened in 1983 and published in 1985. Doesn't seem like a good
> comparison.
> >