From: Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
Like PL/I, it also
borrowed the indispensable notion of structs from business languages
(Flowmatic, Comtran, Cobol).
That is an interesting insight. I always thought that structs were
inspired by the assembler DORG construct, and hence the shared namespace
for members.
The above insight goes some way to explain why PDP11 “as” did not have
a DORG construct, but early C did have ‘struct'.
Paul