[TUHS] What would early alternatives to C have been?

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Monday, March 10th, 2025 at 4:25 PM, Greg A. Woods <woods at robohack.ca> wrote:

>
> ...
> 
> Which reminds me, wasn't there was some mention of difficulties with
> Pascal et al w.r.t. separate compilation earlier in this thread....
> Wasn't that one of the features of Berkeley Pascal? I know separate
> compilation is a definitely a feature by the time it makes it to
> SunOS/Solaris-2. I remember trying to figure it out once for a class
> assignment and the TA scowled at me and asked me why on earth I would
> ever want to do that, so I never trusted that TA on programming
> languages, or much of anything else, ever again.
> 
> ...
> 
> --
> Greg A. Woods gwoods at acm.org
> 
> 
> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack woods at robohack.ca
> 
> Planix, Inc. woods at planix.com Avoncote Farms woods at avoncote.ca

If by separate compilation you mean the compiler spits out (possibly optionally)
human-readable assembler, I would assume that is nearly crucial for any systems
language, otherwise you're putting a lot of faith in an ABI when it comes to
linking with your machdep assembly files no?  I'd be nervous to use something
for bare metal programming that I couldn't easily inspect the resulting
assembler code from...

- Matt G.