Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!alice!dmr From: dmr@alice.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Late Bloomers Revisited Message-ID: <10248@alice.UUCP> Date: 18 Dec 89 06:28:46 GMT Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ Lines: 26 Grandi's history of languages, , seems moderately plausible up until the part I know about directly. Perhaps we have an effect like the one observed after Velikovsky's books: the astronomers agreed that the astronomy was bogus, but some were impressed by his history; some historians thought the opposite. Specifics: Multics was sophisticated, but I would not call it simple and efficient. There was never any plan to write it in BCPL (this would be an anachronism if nothing else). B (the name is an intersection of BCPL and Bonnie, Thompson's wife's name) was done by Thompson at Bell Labs. Waterloo (the Canadian university) got it much later, and made good use of it--to develop Eh and Zed, for example, but this was a branch off the main line. Bourne came to work at Bell Labs after C started, and stayed for several years (rather more than just a visit). He didn't "influence" the Bourne shell and adb, he wrote them. To respond to the topic that started this discussion off: the type structure of C was in fact profoundly influenced by Algol 68. And all the languages mentioned are indeed descendants of Algol 60. Dennis Ritchie dmr@research.att.com att!research!dmr