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On 30/12/2023 21:02, Björn Lundin wrote:
> On 2023-12-30 21:19, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>> Björn Lundin writes:
>>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>
>>>> To people like me who migrated from assembler to C, it was heaven.
>>>
>>> And the intention of the language. To be portable assembler.
>>
>> I’m not sure that’s born out by the history (e.g. [1]).
>
> Hmm, me surprised and some googling later, I see that.
> I've heard a lot of times about c was created because
> they (K&R) wanted to write a portable OS to one of
> the early PDPs, instead of rewriting it in assembler for that particular
> CPU. But it seems to be an urban legend.
> I stand corrected
>
>
IIRC they needed a language that was better than assembler to write
their new OS in.
So being primarily an engineer and a comp sci, they threw it together
based on previous languages like ALGOL, B, and BCPL.
And you should remember the distinction between C as syntax, and the
standard libraries it had.
Malloc() and free[() are arguably NOT part of the C language, but its
standard implementation.
Certainly in my case programming 8 and 16 bit micros, they didn't come
with the compilers! Nor did any file I/O.
I think stdlib was all we got. String handling mainly. And possibly
floating point but on a 6809? Seriously?
On those platforms it WAS simply a fast way to write assembler. They
didn't have a whole lot of registers, and if I/O was memory mapped. I/O
calls were simple pointer dereferences.
At that level as far as I was concerned I could wrote e.g. bios code
about 4-10 times faster than assembler in a far more readable fashion
with almost no performance overheads.
If (weather==wet) take(umbrella);
is, in the assembler of then, a huge series of memory accesses and
compare and jump instructions which don't make the idea of what the
program is trying to do, any clearer at all.
In fact in general I would write two lines of comments for every line of
assembler.
They only time you needed assembler was in handling Intel style I/O and
probably some interrupt service routines, or writing things like context
switchers where you had to mess around with the stack pointers
Now at that level, we didn't need to be reminded of the fact that we
were dealing with hardware, not some compscis wet dream of a Turing
machine abstraction. Stomp on some other routines memory and it will
bite you in the bum. Stomp on the stack and all bets are off.
So we took extreme care not to.
The problem was really that C was *so* good, that people did start to
write hugely complex stuff in it, and using people who wouldn't know a
register or a stack pointer if it poked them in the eye or how DMA
worked...to write them.
--
How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think.
Adolf Hitler
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