[TUHS] Hypothetical: Could MULTICS have been written in C, if available?

[John Levine via TUHS]

According to Clem Cole via TUHS <clemc at ccc.com>:
>On Sun, May 24, 2026 at 11:14 PM Adam Thornton via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
>wrote:
>
>> That tracks: Melinda's husband Lee is the only person I know who really
>> used TSS.
>>
>You might be surprised.  

I used it when I was in high school in Princeton around 1970.

>Coming back to the question of PL/1 *vs. *C, I have a longer responce on
>quora:  https://www.quora.com/What-makes-the-C-language-powerful that I
>will crib here.   When PL/1 and Algol68 were being created, and frankly,
>later with Ada and others, there was always a tendency to go overboard.
>But to me, the less-is-more rule applies: C is powerful not only because of
>what is in the language but also because of what Dennis (and Ken) left out.

PL/I was a surprisingly good language given its creation story, hacked
together in a hurry and intended to handle everything you could do in
Fortran, Cobol, and/or Algol, but it did indeed have a case of kitchen
sink-itis.

IBM had system programming subsets PL/S, used in OS/360, and PL.8 used in
the 801 project.  I see that Multics was bootstrapped through a subset
called EPL and suspect even after there was a full compiler, the system
code stayed close to what that subset allowed.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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