Third public review of X3J11 C (a scientist speaks up)

[Charles Marslett]

In article <36243 at yale-celray.yale.UUCP>, leichter at venus.ycc.yale.edu (Jerry Leichter (LEICHTER-JERRY at CS.YALE.EDU)leichter at venus.ycc.yale.edu (Jerry Leichter (LEICHTER-JERRY at CS.YALE.EDU)leichter at venus.ycc.yale.edu (Jerry Leichter (LEICHTER-JERRY at CS.YALE.EDU)leichter at venus.ycc.yale.edu (Jerr writes:
> On the contrary:  C is NOT woefully deficient for the vast majority of
> applications to which the vast majority of "paying users" are interested in
> applying it.

I find this comment and the attitude of the author woefully parochial -- I do
not program in COBOL and I might not even recognize a either a data entry
language or a data base language if it hit me in the face, but I do know that
more money (real dollars, payroll hours or however you want to look at it) is
spent on programs that are much more difficult to write in C than in the
language they are written in (and in some cases -- heresy -- that language
is even 8086 assembly language!).  I am quite certain that spreadsheets
garner more user dollars than C compilers for any computers other than
Crays and Suns (and Fortran compilers are probable ahead of C compilers on
at least the Crays).

C is rapidly catching up with Pascal as the second most well known language
but it has a long way to go before it becomes as well know (and perhaps as
useful)as BASIC (more heresy?).

For my purposes, C is the language of choice most of the time (by a fair
margin -- I have no second choice, except maybe Modula were C to vanish
from the face of the earth).  But C is not a universal language and she
does not appear to be expanding into other areas of applicability any more
rapidly than her elder brother and sister, FORTRAN and LISP.  And I think this
is both A GOOD THING, and the reason that it is unlikely to be a major language
20 years from now.  I have plenty of spare time in 20 years to learn several
new small languages and I have no real need to program in Ada or PL/I.

(How do you like my personification of programming language? Shall we create
a few mythic tales to describe her birth?)

Charles Marslett
chasm at killer.dallas.tx.us