Five little languages and how they grew: Dennis Ritchie's talk at HOPL on the
Dennis M. Ritchie's 1993 HOPL conference transcript compares C with languages like Bliss, Pascal, Algol 68, and BCPL. He discusses similarities, unique features, and design challenges, offering insights into historical context and language development.
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The transcript presented by Dennis M. Ritchie at the HOPL conference in 1993 focuses on the relationships between C and other contemporary languages like Bliss, Pascal, Algol 68, and BCPL. Ritchie highlights the similarities among these languages in terms of their atomic types, operations, and procedural nature, influenced by Algol 60 and FORTRAN. He discusses the unique features and challenges of Bliss, the similarities between Pascal and C despite different design intents, and the complex nature of Algol 68 as a language designed by an official committee. Ritchie's talk provides insights into the historical context and design considerations that shaped these programming languages, shedding light on the development of C and its place among its peers.
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6 commentsI have fond memories of Pascal, but when I think about it is actually Turbo Pascal I have great memories of and not so much the language itself.
Turbo C/C++ was surprisingly a worse environment for me despite being much more fluent in C, which shows the important of a responsive IDE.
The Development of the C Language
or,
Five Little Languages and How They GrewIt's also worth a read: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/6424.315691
Their all-in utility. That is, their utility after taking into account usability, but also availability, availability and robustness of libraries, perhaps portability, and I'm sure there are more variables that affect net utility.
Does anyone know what the other languages descended from C they might have been referring to circa 1993?
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