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Re: About the C programming language...

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On 2014-06-07, aminer <aminer@toto.net> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> It was a statement from C. A. R. Hoare (case statement, quicksort fame) 
> in "Great Papers in Computer Science", 1996. He wrote a preface in 1994 
> to his and Wirth's paper "An Axiomatic Definition of the Programming 
> Language Pascal" to put that paper in context.

Everything Hoare wrote about C pretty much applies to Pascal. (And what
was that bit about Unix being a single-user operating system?)

Pascal and its ilk are just inconvenient implementations of the same concept
as C.

Any Pascal program can be translated into C, while retaining essentially the
same organization of its code and data.

Plus C has additional powers so that the reverse isn't the case.

Also, C isn't the same language that Thompson and Ritchie invented to develop
and support Unix. By the end of the 1980's, there was ANSI C; a considerably
improved C with better type safety.

Donald Knuth was a big Pascal programmer. The TeX type setting system and
surrounding tools were developed in Pascal after all.

You take a look at this: http://tex.loria.fr/litte/knuth-interview

  CLB: Did you integrate WEB with C because so many programmers today are using
  it, or do you personally like C and write with it?

  Knuth: I think C has a lot of features that are very important. The
  way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation; it
  solved a lot of problems that we had before in data structuring and
  made the programs look good afterwards. C isn't the perfect language,
  no language is, but I think it has a lot of virtues, and you can avoid
  the parts you don't like. I do like C as a language, especially
  because it blends in with the operating system (if you're using UNIX,
  for example).

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Thread

About the C programming language... aminer <aminer@toto.net> - 2014-06-07 03:06 -0700
  Re: About the C programming language... aminer <aminer@toto.net> - 2014-06-07 03:10 -0700
    Re: About the C programming language... Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> - 2014-06-08 02:21 +0000

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