On Sat, Jul 6, 2024 at 8:52 AM <sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au> wrote:

Is this right:

C was the first ’systems tool’ language + libraries available across many platforms.

No !! Not even close.

ESPOL predators all of them, although one can say since it was only available on Burroughs large, medium, and small systems - it was retargeted, but not widely used.

Other systems programming languages followed, BCPL, BLISS, PL/360 and even B before C. If you consider PL/M a child of PL/360 (which is was more than child of PL/1 if you look at it), all of the others have code generators and libraries for multiple ISA and OS and did before C did. That said, I don't think any fo them have as many targets as C and many FORTRAN.

I might accept this rephrasing:

While other systems' programming languages existed, and many were retargets to multiple ISA/OS combinations, because of its appearance as a language with a licensed but open implementation, at the time of the first widespread available of inexpensive microprocessors, the language and it libraries became (and continues to remain) the widest and most popular systems development language in production use.

WRT: FORTRAN. John is correct; Kahan and his students demonstrated the core problem with Paranoia ( https://www.netlib.org/paranoia/ ). But remember that the FP issue was more than just a FORTRAN problem [BTW: I took that class in those days]. You are correct that private extensions were also a problem, although through F4 - the 'standard was IBM's 'G' compiler, and while most vendors ensured they could pass the ANSI test suite, smart vendors made sure they were IBM FORTRAN-G compliant. A good example is the original Adventure game written on DEC's PDP-10 FORTRAN compiler in the late 1970s, but it seemed to be running on anything a FORTRAN compiler within weeks of its release on the ARPAnet [I know that my peeps and I fed it to FORTRAN-G on TSS].

The same issue of "ANSI Standard" vs "De Facto Standard" occurred with F77, but the de facto standard was VMS FORTRAN by that time That said, by F90, which is also post IEEE 754 [FP format] - portable FORTRAN code in the wild was really not the issue it had been in the 60s and 70s. FWIW: With FORTRAN 2018, the compiler most people reference and for code that runs on most supers is Intel's (DEC derived) ifort - but even Intel is replacing that with their investment in IFX, the LLVM-based backend using Intel rewritten (and FOSS) LLVM FORTRAN front end.

Clem