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

[George Michaelson]

Is nobody going to tell stories about the #define of Bourne Shell fame?

-G

On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 2:00 PM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:

> At 2025-03-10T22:18:43-0400, John Levine wrote:
> > 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 { } [ ] | < >
>
> "begin" and "end" were fine.
>
> I've heard a story that Pascal was unpopular in the Middle East;
> every programming student wanted to know why they had to pay homage to
> Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in every program, which tells you
> how old this story is.
>
> > 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.
>
> My understanding of the feedback procedure for ISO C23 finalization is
> that some NBs (national bodies) fought pretty hard to keep trigraphs.
>
> I _think_ they're gone from the final version of the standard, but I
> don't have an official version, just a "final" draft, and my impression
> of the WG14 meeting minutes from last year was that this particular
> issue was fought to the bitter end.
>
> So maybe they snuck back in at the 11th hour.
>
> Regards,
> Branden
>
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