The history of the C language

This is a good read for anyone interested in computer history: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html

“After the TMG version of B was working, Thompson rewrote B in itself (a bootstrapping step). During development, he continually struggled against memory limitations: each language addition inflated the compiler so it could barely fit, but each rewrite taking advantage of the feature reduced its size.”

“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language efficient enough to displace assembly language, yet sufficiently abstract and fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments.”

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