21 May
2020
21 May
'20
10:09 p.m.
On 2020-05-21 1:35 PM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Toby Thain
<toby(a)telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
>
> - inexpensive compiler availability was not very good until ~1990 or
> later, but C had been taking off like wildfire for 10 years before that
PCC contributed to this. Everybody and their brother was porting Unix
to their fancy new CPU architecture / hardware. All you had to do was
bootstrap a cross-compiler version of PCC on a PDP-11 (or more likely
Vax), then get Unix to boot and Voila.
(I remember reading a paper about how Motorola did just that for
the MC 680x0 family.)
Yes, but Johnson had already done the work. Imho compilers were still
considered pretty complex magic and you wouldn't lightly write one from
scratch.
And yeah all the vendors wanted to get a compiler out with minimal
effort, which is why they often weren't very good.
C and Unix were established in Academia and Industry
well before 1990.
That was much later.
--Toby
I get the impression that an important part of
its popularity was how C
(and C++) became the language of choice on the PC, and displaced Pascal in
the process.
C++ became the language of choice on the PC when MSFT started pushing
its compiler and Visual Studio IDE.
At least, this is my two cents.
Arnold