Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!mordor!joyce!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Basics of Program Design
Message-ID: <200@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 27 Jul 88 05:08:38 GMT
References: <10981@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
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Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
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In article <10981@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (RAMontante) writes:
:cjl@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Charles Lord) writes:
:>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.
:>> and (b) history is against you:  C's designers claim that they put this
:>> [++ and --] feature in *before* they got a PDP-11.
:>
:>WRONG.  C *was* based on BCPL which predates the '11 *but*
:>K&R state in the Preface to THE book, 1st ed:
:>  "C was originally designed for ... UNIX ... on the DEC PDP-11, 
:>   by Dennis Ritchie"
:In 2nd ed., it still says "C was originally designed for and implemented on
:the UNIX operating system on the DEC PDP-11, by Dennis Ritchie."
:
:On the other hand, the preface to "The UNIX Programming Environment", by
:Kernighan and Pike, says "The UNIX operating system started on a cast-off
:DEC PDP-7 at Bell Laboratories in 1969....

I apologise for expressing myself badly.  My point was that C got the
autoincrement operators from B, and that feature was put into >>B<<
before they got a PDP-11.  I could be wrong about that too, but it hardly
matters, because B was interpreted.