History of C (Re: Why do you use a devil as a mascot?)

[Ian Smith]

In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 337, Issue 1, Message: 19
On Sun, 14 Nov 2010 17:29:10 -0700 Chad Perrin wrote:
 > On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 02:39:32PM -0800, Gary Kline wrote:
 > > 
 > > 	About 2000, 2001 was when I shucked my "muuz" game/mind-machine 
 > > 	effort.  It was over 10K line of C-ish code that I rehacked into 
 > > 	C++.  Figured since C++ was "_the_ new language" that it was a 
 > > 	good move.  Then I realized how you could spend a lifetime
 > > 	learning C++ I backed off and kept it simple.

Deftly avoiding the whirlpool.  Delphi was the similar suck from Pascal.

 > Hardly new.  It hasn't been the Next Big Thing since the '80s.  Java was
 > the Next Big Thing in the '90s.  We don't exactly have a new Next Big
 > Thing for the '00s, from what I can see -- and maybe that's a good thing.
 >
 > Agile development is the Next Big Thing for development methodologies,
 > but that's a somewhat separate issue.

Whatever that means, I'll take your word for it :)

 > > 	Yeah, it's on amazon.com, but "my bible" {seriously!} is good
 > > 	enough.  Dog-earned and coffee-stained; but it's the same as the
 > > 	2nd Ed.  The 2nd is ANSI-ified, IIRC.
 > 
 > That's correct -- 2nd Ed is the ANSI C version of basically the same
 > text.

Hey, didn't know I had a rare '78 first ed; ANSI not even in the index. 
I confess to buying it secondhand in '94 from a likely sorry bloke, and 
wonder if anyone's published a diff (ono) to the 2nd ed?

But my most dog-eared, tabbed and note-stuffed reference is Kernighan & 
Plauger's Software Tools in Pascal ('81) - lovely if only for quality of 
the writing and typesetting.  Appropriate thread for a little heresy? :)

cheers, Ian