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From: jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Basics of Program Design
Message-ID: <17579@glacier.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 21 Jul 88 17:50:16 GMT
References: <901@td2cad.intel.com> <3061@rpp386.UUCP> <395@proxftl.UUCP> <53374@ti-csl.CSNET> <464@proxftl.UUCP> <Jul.10.00.30.47.1988.21186@aramis.rutgers.edu> <505@proxftl.UUCP> <182@quintus.UUCP>
Reply-To: jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle)
Distribution: na
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 13

In article <182@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>No part of the design of C caters to the PDP-11.
>The *only* thing in C which would justify the "PDP-11" claim is
>the autoincrement pointer operations, but note that (a) the PDP-11
>directly supports only two of those operations, and not on all types,
>and (b) history is against you:  C's designers claim that they put this
>feature in *before* they got a PDP-11.

      Wrong.  See "The C Programming Language", by Kernigan and Richie,
original 1978 edition, ISBN 0-13-110163-3, page ix.  More of the
language philosophy can be found in the original Bell Systems Technical
Journal on "The UNIX operating system", circa 1978.

					John Nagle