[TUHS] roff(7) [ and other related stuff ]

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sat, 1 Jan 2022, Larry McVoy wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 01, 2022 at 08:04:58PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>
>> Why use C syntax?  What was wrong with Fortran, Lisp, or Cobol syntax,
>> extended to do what you wanted?
>
> I'm almost speechless.  My progression was Basic, Pascal, C (and later
> Fortran, Lisp, no Cobol, I did an Ada Compiler so Ada I guess).  Then
> on to awk, perl, tcl, I tried to like C++ but couldn't, tried to like
> Rust, Go, D, and couldn't.

Kinda sounds like me.  Classic Microsoft BASIC, then QBASIC which was a 
mutant freak dialect with structs, functions and stuff... started learning 
C++ and then moved to C.  I rarely use anything these days but C and once 
in a blue moon QBASIC for something quick and dirty.

> If you think any of those other languages remotely approach the elegance
> of C, I just don't know what to say.

This.

I think it blends terseness, cleanness, simplicity and ease of use in just 
the right quantities in a way no language before or since has really been 
able to muster.  Its only real weakness to me is that it isn't very good 
at string handling (the reason I sometimes kitbash stuff in BASIC still).

-uso.