Comments on: Dennis Ritchie has died; https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/ Sun, 16 Oct 2011 21:31:53 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.6 By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-509000 Sun, 16 Oct 2011 21:31:53 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-509000 See this:

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/i_got_this_note_from_john_ritc.php

]]> By: Leprechaun Salon Software https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508999 Sun, 16 Oct 2011 20:34:20 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508999 R.I.P Dennis Ritchie..!! We will Miss you..!!

]]> By: MadScientist https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508998 Fri, 14 Oct 2011 08:20:05 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508998 @GrayGaffer: Is that really why there were so many parts of MSWin declared to pass parameters via the pascal convention?

@Rich#21: Code portability is something the AT&T guys worked on in the later years of C, but Richard Miller and others in Australia deserve the credit for really pushing portability and cross-compilation: http://www.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@inf/@scsse/documents/doc/uow103747.pdf

]]> By: Rich Wilson https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508997 Fri, 14 Oct 2011 04:34:29 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508997 I think the most significant thing about C is that it was a great leap forward in cross platform compatibility.

http://herbsutter.com/2011/10/12/dennis-ritchie/

]]> By: SRG https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508996 Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:20:58 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508996 Sad news indeed, just been informed that Dennis Ritchie Developer of the C language, Multics and our beloved UNIX operating sytem has passed away. (September 9, 1941 â?? October 8, 2011).
I have spent 20+ years working as a UNIX Systems Engineer / Admin, thanks to the ground breaking and innovative development Dennis and the rest of the Bell Labs gang laid out in the 70’s. RIP Dennis and Thank You!

]]> By: GrayGaffer https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508995 Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:21:47 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508995 MadScientist: FAR PASCAL was not because Pascal was used, it was because (by accident) that particular ordering of mapping function arguments (left to right) in the call to their stack image for the called function to unwrap turned out to be more convenient since it allows for variable argument lists and also yields (slightly) more efficient object code. The FAR part refers to the segmented addressing architecture of the 16 bit x86 processors.

]]> By: GrayGaffer https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508994 Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:07:15 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508994 timberwolf: actually, C syntax is a reduced variant of ALGOL, the ancestor of that imperative style. The form has changed very little, although the specific characters used for the syntactical tokens may change a bit (e.g. ALGOL blocks with begin – end, while C uses { – }).

C continues to be a mainstay at the OS level, and not just in the big 2 1/2 (darwin derives from BSD). Note that C was designed to be an easier alternative to ASM specifically for writing portable Operating Systems. Only the really small (8 bits) embedded machines these days still have to drop down to ASM or FORTH for their OSes.

C abstracts out the hardware while leaving the algorithmic and program structure details to the programmer. All higher level languages typically try to abstract out above that level either (or both) in support of certain algorithmic or syntactical styles or in support of “safer” programming (show me a language that guarantees you can not shoot yourself in the foot, and I’ll show you one that makes it all but impossible to do anything of serious magnitude – or how to shoot your foot in it).

]]> By: MadScientist https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508993 Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:03:46 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508993 @Greg #15: Don’t you mean von Neumann blogging? (code and instructions living together)

I never understood the “C is hard” thing – every time I hear a self-proclaimed programmer say something like that, or “assembly is hard” or “writing device drivers is hard” or “mutlithreading/multiprocessing is hard” my immediate response is “well you’re no goddamned good then, are you?”

]]> By: MadScientist https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508992 Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:43:22 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508992 Kernighan and Ritchie were great – but I wouldn’t hire anyone who still uses the K&R book except in a history class. Bell Labs has an article on the history of C: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html

@Markk: If WinDuhs is C, why all the FAR PASCAL declarations? It may have been built with a C compiler for the past 25 years, but PASCAL was the flavor of the month way back then and it still shows. The same goes for the Apple monitor program and Apple’s SystemX.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508991 Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:41:32 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/13/dennis-ritchie-has-died/#comment-508991 Holy cow, the troll is in the blog itself and not the comments!-)

Think of it as object oriented blogging: Data and instructions in the same entity.

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