minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow) (08/16/83)
In a note on pointers and arrays, cbosgd!mark wrote: "The fact that so many people are using C for applications shows not that C is well suited for applications, but that it's usable for applications and nothing else is supported as well on UNIX." Why stop at Unix? C is becoming very popular on a large number of operating systems, even where a very wide range of applications languages are available. For example, on VMS, you can write in Pascal, PL/I, Cobol, Basic-Plus, or Fortran. C's main advantages, as I see them, are its efficiency and transportability. Also, the I/O model makes most programs exceedingly simple to develop and support. The work I'm doing, DECtalk, runs on four architectures (DEC10, PDP-11, Vax, and 68000) and a half-dozen operating systems without source code edits. (There is a slight amount of conditional compilation, however.) I know of no other language where this could be done compatibly without severe loss of efficiency. Martin Minow decvax!minow