23 May
2020
23 May
'20
1:28 p.m.
On 5/23/20, Greg A. Woods <gwoods(a)acm.org> wrote:
I would also argue that non-Unix C compilers actually drove the adoption
curve of C. Pascal tried to play catch-up, but just as with what
happened to me in university where it was one of the teaching languages,
C was just far more popular and though Pascal had a tiny head-start (in
terms of first-published books/manuals), C overtook it and had far more
staying power too (though indeed in the late 1980s there was a fair
battle going on in the pc/mac/amiga/etc world for Pascal).
This is my recollection as well. In the late 80s with the
introduction of really nice compilers for MS-DOS like Turbo C from
Borland (1987), Watcom C 6.0 (1988) and mature versions of Microsoft C
(which originally was based on Lattice C), the C future was
solidified.
The documentation coming with those compilers were also excellent. I
still have tons of reference books from that period. It was a time
when almost everybody was using pure C. I think C++ needed another
5-7 years to displace C in the application market.
--A