The first chapter of K&R was out as a technical paper at least a year prior to the book coming out.
By the time the book had come out, there had already been some evolution in the language. The “Phototypesetter” and soon after “Version 7” versions of the compiler were heading toward what would be come ANSI by the time BDS came out.
Amusingly, I ended up working for an unrelated company called BDS and ended up with the BDS.COM domain. Eventually, we changed the name of the company and after brief inquiry from them donated the BDS.COM domain to the compiler guys.
At least it didn’t come with a prayer book like the Metalware compiler (which really needed all the divine intervention that it could get).
------ Original Message ------
Date 2/28/2023 8:21:42 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: Any Bell 8-bit UNIX Efforts?
I'm glad that you qualified it with "for the time"; I've used it, and
calling it a "C compiler" was a bit of a stretch[*]. Later on I bought
the Hi-Tech C compiler, and it was full ANSI, with function prototypes
etc.
Hmm. K&R publication date was February 1978. BDS C was released in August 1979. So it was certainly C as known at that time. X3J11 was convened in 1983 and published in 1985. Doesn't seem like a good comparison.