[TUHS] What would early alternatives to C have been?
John Levine
johnl at taugh.com
Tue Mar 11 12:18:43 AEST 2025
It appears that Greg A. Woods <tuhs at tuhs.org> said:
>I think one of the most loved innovations C (and B just before it)
>brought to programming languages was the use of braces instead of
>begin/end, along with the elimination of some of the other extra
>unnecessary keywords like "then". ...
I suspect that's because they came along just late enough that
everything used ASCII, and they got those cool Model 37 Teletypes, so
they could assume that devices could generate and print punctuation
like { } [ ] | < >
The C standards used to have (still have?) trigraph equivalents for much
of the punctuation for people on systems that don't have the characters.
R's,
John
More information about the TUHS
mailing list