Timeline for How to get started writing C for the IBM PC in 1980-81
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
22 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 10, 2017 at 7:58 | comment | added | Cody Gray | People have been saying that Java is a fad since the mid-90s. One of these days, they are going to be right! @Aaron | |
| Jul 5, 2017 at 15:00 | comment | added | JeremyP | @Aaron You have been unlucky then. I certainly have met people who are the way you describe, but in my experience, they are the minority. | |
| Jul 5, 2017 at 14:46 | comment | added | Aaron | @JeremyP Perhaps that makes them ethically unprofessional, yet the portion of paid engineers who do this is, in my experience, very high. In both current and previous jobs, there are plenty who insist on C++ for everything, a few who insist on Python for everything, and similar for other languages/techs. A previous manager of mine who dissed Java and Python even said that he sees Java & JVM langs as a fad dying in a decade and C++ taking its rightful place as industry standard and universal. My encounters with technically&linguistically open-minded engineers are the exception at multiple jobs. | |
| Jul 2, 2017 at 14:06 | comment | added | JeremyP | @ChrisR Actually C has always been faster than Pascal. Pascal mandates bounds checking and other sanity checks, as you say, which is a much bigger drag on performance than when you pop function arguments off the stack. Pascal was preferred as a teaching language to C because it is a better teaching language. The syntax is less confusing for beginners and it has all those safety features built in. | |
| Jun 30, 2017 at 16:40 | comment | added | ChrisR | Pascal was preferred over C in academia because the convention was to pop the arguments to a procedure as part of the return (8086 ASM: RET 6). C requires the caller to pop the arguments off the stack after return. Makes Pascal marginally faster than C, hence it's popularity on 1, 2,4 and 4.77MHz processors. Pascal compilers were written to protect the programmer from his/herself and crashing the OS(array bounds checks, addressing exceptions, buffer overruns etc), This was (and still is) considered A GOOD THING. Strange that so many security exploits rely on such vulnerabilities. | |
| Jun 30, 2017 at 12:40 | comment | added | Wossname | @JeremyP, oh boy that was a real Hail Mary. | |
| Jun 30, 2017 at 10:23 | comment | added | JeremyP | @Wossname No the Pope really likes C. I read somewhere that, in fact, he is a C-aholic. At least I'm pretty sure that's what it said. | |
| Jun 30, 2017 at 10:21 | comment | added | JeremyP | @Aaron Then they are unprofessional. | |
| Jun 30, 2017 at 9:11 | comment | added | Wossname | I thought the Pope was more into Assembly language. | |
| Jun 29, 2017 at 23:19 | comment | added | Aaron | @JeremyP wrote "professional software developers don't have dogmatic views about which language to use, they look at the target platform and then pick (what they think is) the best language that is available" I am seriously trying to decide whether you are joking here. I cannot go anywhere without having decisions tainted by software developers (professional or otherwise) who decide based on dogmatic views about the language. I usually do not encounter developers who pick the best or most appropriate language, rather the language they root for as one roots for a sports team. | |
| Jun 29, 2017 at 22:36 | comment | added | ShreevatsaR | @JeffZeitlin Case in point about Pascal's availability: when Donald E. Knuth (at Stanford) decided in ~1980 that he had to rewrite his TeX program (that had been written in the SAIL language) into something that was maximally portable, he chose Pascal (after writing his own WEB system partly to overcome the deficiencies of Pascal). It was possibly one of the most portable (and ported) programs of its size and complexity at the time—the early TUGboat issues are full of reports of different people having ported the program to their installations. | |
| Jun 28, 2017 at 15:12 | comment | added | Jeff Zeitlin | @DavidRicherby - I'll have to check that; I thought that TP for CP/M, at least, predated that. Not impossible that I'm remembering wrong, though. | |
| Jun 28, 2017 at 14:52 | comment | added | David Richerby | @JeffZeitlin Though note that Turbo Pascal itself wasn't released until 1983. | |
| Jun 28, 2017 at 13:46 | comment | added | JeremyP | @MartinBonner When I wrote the first draft of the answer, I had three bullet points only. After proof reading and just before posting, I thought of "wait for a C compiler to become available" and added it as option 3. (That, btw is a perfectly reasonable choice, especially if you know one is about to be released). After posting the answer I noticed I hadn't changed the line above to say "four" and Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones immediately and surprisingly popped into my head. I must say I wasn't expecting the Spanish Inquisition. | |
| Jun 28, 2017 at 11:34 | comment | added | Martin Bonner supports Monica | "based on a quotation" - some of us read that line with Micheal Palin's voice in our heads. I'm kinda shocked that somebody didn't recognize it. | |
| Jun 27, 2017 at 15:58 | comment | added | JeremyP | To the person who suggested the edit to the "Amongst... " line, sorry I rejected most of it, but the line is based on a quotation and I had it correct. except for the punctuation. | |
| S Jun 27, 2017 at 15:57 | history | edited | JeremyP | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Rejecting most of the suggested edit because it is based on a quote and I had it rightrexcept the punctuation
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| Jun 27, 2017 at 15:39 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Jun 27, 2017 at 15:57 | |||||
| Jun 27, 2017 at 13:49 | comment | added | AnoE | @JeremyP, no problem, I'm happy to agree to disagree. | |
| Jun 27, 2017 at 12:57 | comment | added | JeremyP | @AnoE Thank you for your comment, but I did answer the question as written. I gave three alternatives to not using C. Two of them did not really need expanding and the other (cross compiling) has been dealt with by other answers. I think this web site benefits by also discussing questions from a slightly different point of view occasionally.. If my answer was the only answer, you might have a valid point. but it is not. | |
| Jun 27, 2017 at 11:24 | comment | added | Jeff Zeitlin | Also, in 1981, Pascal was far more common than it is today - it's surprising how many executables from that era, when hexdumped, show signs of having been written in one or another version of Turbo Pascal. | |
| Jun 27, 2017 at 9:04 | history | answered | JeremyP | CC BY-SA 3.0 |