Re: Why the C programming language book was never updated past C89?

From	Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.c
Subject	Re: Why the C programming language book was never updated past C89?
Date	2015-02-06 17:13 +0000
Organization	go, ion artisan!
Message-ID	<mb2snc$udo$1@dont-email.me> (permalink)
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On 06/02/15 14:18, James Kuyper wrote:
> On 02/06/2015 08:45 AM, Richard Heathfield wrote:
>> On 06/02/15 13:31, James Kuyper wrote:
> ...
>>> Why? While a solid majority of native speakers of English are from the
>>> US(58.5%),
>>
>> Native English speakers are born in England. That's what "native" means.
>
> In US English, native speakers of a language are those who speak that
> language as their first language, regardless of where they were born. I
> was unaware that this was one of the differences between the two
> dialects - and I honestly doubt that it is. I think you're just
> redefining the term to support an unsupportable claim.

Firstly, English is not a dialect. It is a language. Secondly, I base my 
claim that a native speaker of English is someone born in England on the 
etymology of "native", which descends from the Latin "nativus" (birth or 
origin), which stems from "natus" (born), which itself stems from 
"nasci" (to be born). It is, therefore, not an unreasonable way to
interpret the term. Mine may not be the /only/ definition of "native", 
but it is certainly a perfectly valid definition, and it is the one I've 
used all my adult life. I'm not in the habit of re-defining words on the 
fly in an attempt to win arguments. (That's not to say that I've never 
done it, or that I won't do it in future. But it's not a habit! And I 
didn't do it on this occasion.)

Of course, in your own language, you are free to define terms as you 
will. If, however, you name your language "English" and then go on to 
borrow many hundreds of thousands of English words with which to 
populate that language (and frequently changing not only their spellings 
but even their meanings in the process), we should hardly be surprised 
if occasionally there arise little disputes such as this one over the 
meanings of words.

The parallels with C are striking. Dennis Ritchie was of course a 
Hertfordshire man by birth, and Ken Thompson hailed from Somerset. They 
met at Cambridge University in 1961, and thanks to a shared love of 
Morris dancing they became firm friends. In 1964, scratching around for 
a dissertation subject, they consulted their tutor, who said "under no 
circumstances should you create your own operating system or your own 
language". Rightly taking this as a broad hint, they decided to do both. 
They worked hand in glove on both projects, and then tossed a coin to 
decide who would submit which dissertation. Ken won, so he took the 
credit for Unix, leaving Ritchie with the credit for C.

The name "C" is a curious one, and it has an interesting derivation. 
Most programming languages of the time were American, so Ken and Dennis 
originally called their own work "British Computer Programming 
Language", or BCPL for short. Eventually, they decided this was terribly 
long-winded. As they continued to develop it, they ended up dropping the 
CPL bit, and just called it B. And then, one May morning, with the 
dissertation date looming, the 'B' key on Dennis's typewriter got stuck, 
just as he was typing out the title page of his dissertation. He thumped 
it a bit, but it was well and truly stuck, so he typed "The C 
Programming Language" instead. Ken came along with a hammer a few 
minutes later to fix the key in the manner of the traditional British 
craftsman, but they had no time to re-work the text, and in any case 
they kind of liked the new name, so it stayed.

At any time you care to mention, the UK's economic state is either 
appalling or catastrophic. Since, at the time, it happened to be 
catastrophic, they decided to do their bit for exports by licensing Unix 
to Microsoft. Unfortunately, further research on their part suggested 
that Microsoft wouldn't exist for another eleven years, so they looked 
around for another buyer. SCO was a promising candidate, but again they 
would have to wait some time if they wanted to do a deal there. They 
tried phoning IBM, but the line was engaged ("busy"). Eventually, they 
turned to AT&T, who weren't actually a software company, but they did at 
least have the merit of existing, and they did manage to answer the phone.

The deal was struck. Cannily, though, Thompson and Ritchie decided to 
keep C under their hats for a while. They rewrote Unix in SNOBOL, and 
shipped that to AT&T instead. AT&T were delighted with the OS, but 
weren't too happy about the language. This was music to our heroic duo's 
ears. They immediately offered to rewrite Unix in a more sensible 
language, but it would take them many years of tedious research, and 
they would need a laboratory in which to work. AT&T fell for it, hook, 
line, and sinker. "Come to Bell Labs," they said. T&R did precisely 
that, and from time to time over the next few years they would submit 
status reports that were encouraging in tone but which pointed out how 
much more work was required and how much budget it would require. Bell 
Labs paid up quite happily. Meanwhile, T&R were happily bunking off and 
spending their days playing SpaceWars.

Bell Labs finally got wise to what was going on, and said that they'd 
better publish something pretty soon or the deal was off. Thompson and 
Ritchie checked their calendars. Hmm, perhaps five years of SpaceWars 
was taking the mickey a bit. So they blew the dust off the very first C 
manual that Ritchie had cobbled together, recompiled Unix in that rather 
ancient version of C, and handed everything in with a flourish some time 
in the Spring of 1969. They kept the very latest version back, in 
keeping with their normal business strategy.

Well, Bell Labs just *loved* C, even the primitive version that they 
were actually given, but Ritchie managed to persuade them that it needed 
some fine-tuning. This got the pair another four years funding, and they 
spent most of that playing SpaceWars too. Being British, though, they 
had a finely-developed sense of humour, so they spent a few weeks coming 
up with a joke language called C++. In due course, however, they decided 
that it wasn't all that funny after all, so one night they dropped the 
manual on a random desk in the main office (it happened to be the desk 
of a junior programmer with the unlikely name of Stroustrup), and 
thought no more about it.

Eventually, Bell Labs put their foot down again, and this time Dennis 
and Ken gave them the real C language. "And now," they said, "we have to 
write a manual for it. Unfortunately, we don't know American well 
enough. Could we have an American ghost-writer to turn all our pavements 
into sidewalks and handbags into purses?"

Bell Labs lent them Brian Kernighan, who was actually born in a small 
village in County Durham, but he'd emigrated to the USA as a young 
child, so he was fairly fluent in American. In fact, he was so fluent 
that he had all but forgotten how to speak English, which is why it took 
five years to come up with the manual. At least, that's what they 
claimed. It is equally possible that they spent the time writing a 
three-player version of SpaceWars (Project Code: Plan 3).

C, as we all know, became immensely popular, and Kernighan's translation 
of Ritchie's book was a best-seller. Better still, lots of implementors 
thought they could do better than Thompson and Ritchie, so they came up 
with all kinds of extra ideas. The resulting pot-pourri provided years 
of profitable consultancy for Brian, Ken, and Dennis.

The time came, however, when the industry began to demand some kind of 
interoperability between the various dialects of C, and there was a call 
for standardisation. ANSI set up the X3J11 committee, and everybody 
confidently expected that Dennis and Ken, at least, would be included in 
it. Ken, however, persuaded Dennis that they had better uses for their 
time (such as, for example, playing SpaceWars). So they contented 
themselves with firing an occasional potshot at the committee from the 
safety of Bell Labs.

This may have been a mistake.

The ANSI C of 1989 was a worthy language indeed, but Ritchie had more or 
less lost control of it by this stage. This situation worsened when ISO 
stuck their oar in, but at first they played it very cool. They didn't 
actually change anything (other than the section numbering). No, they 
wanted to make sure that the separation between the language and its 
authors was complete.

By 1995, ISO had achieved total separation. Ken and Dennis were no 
longer bothered about ISO's machinations. They had completed Plans 3, 4, 
5, 6, 7, and 8, and now they were working on the best ever version of 
SpaceWars, code-named Plan 9. Naturally, they developed this in their 
own, heavily improved version of C, which they kept pretty much to 
themselves for the time being.

ISO were delighted, because it meant that these British guys were 
finally out of the way, and they could start to Americanise the 
language. "What we need," they said, "is tail fins. Cup holders. 
Electric windows. Power steering. A big V8 engine. Better make that two. 
An electric sun-roof. Electric toothbrush, perhaps. More cup-holders. 
Lots of different /sizes/ of cup-holders. Maybe a gun rack? And 
*obviously* automatic transmission. How these guys ever managed to drive 
a stick-shift language is just ridiculous." And so the features kept 
piling on, as the clean, simple, quintessentially British two-door 
language became stuffed and bloated with "luxury" features, until it 
could hardly go round a corner without falling over. The Americans were 
delighted. That was a proper, *American* language.

But it was already too late. Stroustrup (remember him?) had mistaken the 
manual on his desk for a work assignment. By the time he'd finished with 
C++, even the cup-holders had cup-holders. The American dream had become 
a reality. The showrooms put C++ in the spotlight and draped Miss 
America over its bonnet (or "hood"), and C was relegated to a back 
corner, gathering dust.

Ken, Brian and Dennis noted the commercial demise of C with wry 
amusement. They knew that their language was still the best for actually 
getting things done quickly, but they saw no point in trying to convince 
the world, not when they were busy having the mother of all SpaceWars 
battles, courtesy of Plan 9, and real, proper, sensible, streamlined, 
fast, elegant C. British C.

-- 
Richard Heathfield
Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
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