Language evolution and C
I was in comparative programming languages last night, and we were going over important programming languages in history. Of course, we covered Fortran, Cobol (I was amused because I knew Grace Hopper off the top of my head and the teacher was reading his notes to write her name on the board.), Algol, Lisp, Basic, Pascal (with just a mention that we'd look at it more later) and SmallTalk.
I brought up C, and the teacher was pretty dismissive, jotting it down with a line coming from Pascal (isn't it Algol->CPL->BCPL->C?), and asking for "important" languages. I understand that an important language for Comparative is one that introduced a new approach or new major features, not one that's popular. I think C fits that, though, unless the more important features came from CPL or BCPL. C is different for being a "medium level" language, that adds an awful lot of abstraction over assembler without giving up much of the power, and for encouraging a much more casual view of memory than other languages. That seems more important to me than Pascal, which is more or less just a better Algol.
Am I off-base here?
I brought up C, and the teacher was pretty dismissive, jotting it down with a line coming from Pascal (isn't it Algol->CPL->BCPL->C?), and asking for "important" languages. I understand that an important language for Comparative is one that introduced a new approach or new major features, not one that's popular. I think C fits that, though, unless the more important features came from CPL or BCPL. C is different for being a "medium level" language, that adds an awful lot of abstraction over assembler without giving up much of the power, and for encouraging a much more casual view of memory than other languages. That seems more important to me than Pascal, which is more or less just a better Algol.
Am I off-base here?
