Classic programming

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Sun Aug 9 10:31:25 CDT 2015


    > From: Johnny Billquist

    > And one should not forget Algol.

IIRC, Algol is mentioned in the paper I linked to. Of course, Algol's DNA is
in pretty much every procedural language ever created since it was.

    > From: Andy Holt

    > (and, for that matter, PL/1 should probably be considered an unsung
    > inspiration for C as it was the implementation language for Multics
    > in which Bell labs was a partner and must have inspired at least
    > the name for Unix)

The paper also mentions PL/I - IIRC, they (Ken, Dennis et al) had used it on
Multics, and didn't like it. (Which I can understand!) I'm not sure there are
any ideas from PL/I (specifically) which influenced C.

Multics' influence on Unix is a very sizeable topic, which I won't derail into
- it's an interest of mine, and I've been doing research on that; my hope is
to do a paper on it at some point. The executive abstract is that the two
extremes one hears ('Unix is derived from Multics'/'Unix is in fact a
counter-reaction to Multics') aren't really accurate - the truth is in the
middle.

	Noel


More information about the cctech mailing list