[Beowulf] Re: Beowulf Digest, Vol 54, Issue 46

[Peter St. John]

Perry,
Yes my mistake, // is in C99. Seems like yesterday :-)
And I didn't mean "port" so narrowly, didn't mean to imply he didn't write
an x86 kernel from scratch. And yeah my first x86 was System V, in the mid
80's.
Incidentally, while I understand that "C with Classes" preceeded C++, I use
the term sometimes to refer to the workable, worthwhile subset of C++ (as
subjective as that may be, it's bigger than K&R C). Most of the time, for
myself, I write in K&R C plus // for a C++ compiler.
Peter

On 8/26/08, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
>
>
> "Peter St. John" <peter.st.john at gmail.com> writes:
> > Just for the sake of historicity for those less -- chronologically
> > enhanced-- than RGB or myself, the joke is attributed to Stroustroup, not
> > Thompson.
> >
> > 1. Ken Thompson wrote B (late 60's). Really minimal. Based largely on
> BCPL,
> > but minimal, ergo "B".
> > 2. Ken wrote Unix, in assembler.
> > 3. Dennis Ritchie wrote C (sucessor to "B") to be usably featurefull (you
> > can read the entire definition of B in a few minutes, at
> > http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/kbman.html, which has been scanned
> and
> > cleaned up since I last saw it).
> > 4. Ken and Dennis rewrote unix together in C. (Torvalds ported the kernel
> to
> > the x86 architecture, with an open license, unlike earlier ports; Pavel
> > Curtis ported X, lots of people subsequently did too many too wonderful
> > helpful things, etc)
>
>
> Linus wrote a new POSIX kernel. He did not "port" any form of the
> existing Unix kernel. (There were already real Unixes (that is,
> descendants of the v7 codebase) that were ported to the x86 when Linux
> was born.)
>
>
> > 5. Stroustrup wrote C++ (which in C means, "the sucessor of C", that is,
> the
> > increment operator; so continues the joking naming convention). The name
> > "C++" is something of a joke, and it's sorta funny that it's not "++C"
> (give
> > you the value after incrementing, instead of before) and it is way more
> > featureful than Ritchie's usablility requirement.
>
>
> It started in the early or mid-1980s (I forget which) as "C with
> Classes" and then evolved (or some might say metastasized). Originally
> it was implemented with a preprocessor in front of C (appropriately
> enough called "cfront" IIRC), though the first direct implementations
> showed up by the early 1990s.
>
>
> > As of C89 (I think) the // comment delimiter is in C;
>
>
> No. C89 (the first ANSI C) did not have // as a comment character.
>
>
> > I myself am glad to have functions (methods) associated with structures
> > (classes), it's great organizationally. However, I have never writeen:
> > cout << foo << '\n'
> > and I never will, other than to illustrate what I don't do. I have no
> idea
> > how that looks wholesome in Stoustrup's world view, definitely he has
> huge
> > amounts of language-designer wisdom which I myself do not,
>
>
> I'm not a fan of C++. Many other old Unix hands are also not fans. C++
> is sometimes a necessary evil, but it is rarely a pleasure.
>
> Perry
>
> --
> Perry E. Metzger                perry at piermont.com
>
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